Head of Public Understanding

Please note: this is a part-time contracting role.

People are increasingly turning to AI for real relationships. They use it for companionship, for coaching, for emotional support, for advice, and sometimes on the hardest night of their lives. That is already happening at scale, and most platforms have no way to tell whether a given conversation is helping someone or quietly harming them. At the sharp end that means someone in crisis who nobody notices. In ordinary use it looks like dependency building over weeks, or a person slowly being reshaped in how they think and who they lean on (as if the last decade hadn't isolated us enough). Regulation is moving slowly, which leaves a real gap for people to fall through.

On a happier note: the teams building and using these systems actually care. The missing safety layers usually come down to a shortage of resources, not cynicism and not a lack of empathy. So we at NOPE build open-source classifiers that any team can deploy today, because keeping these interactions safe shouldn't be a privilege only big companies can afford. Alongside the open-source work we build custom tooling and advise organizations in paid engagements. 

We are a very small team, and the conversation about what AI is doing to people in everyday use is still happening in the wrong places and the wrong language. We want someone to change that, out loud.

THE ROLE

The Head of Public Understanding is the person our public voice belongs to. You would build and lead NOPE's presence in the public conversation about AI safety, along with the community of people who care about it: the builders, the researchers, the journalists, the policymakers, and the ordinary users who sense something is off.

PLEASE NOTE: This is initially a part-time role paying approx ~$75 an hour initially for 10hrs a week, 6 weeks total initial contract.

In practice, you run our social channels and write what goes on them, and you turn our research and trackers into things people actually read and argue about. It also means showing up in person at the webinars and events where this conversation is happening near you (sensitive to your locale). Over time (ideally already!) you become a recognizable voice on the subject, and you bring an audience with you. The throughline is making a complicated, easy-to-miss problem legible to people who don't already live in it, and giving them something worth gathering around.

The shape of the role is open, like the rest of what we do. We have a clear point of view and a lot of raw material, but we are not handing you a script. The work is mostly async. You would share what you are trying and what is landing, and we would work it out together.

WHERE WE ARE & OUR PRINCIPLES

We are not an anti-AI project, and we are not shallow cheerleaders for AI either. People have real relationships with AI now, across every kind of context and not only the hard moments, and that will likely not reverse. We are realistic about this. The honest response is to make those relationships safer, with evidence. We want someone who is healthily cynical and genuinely opinionated, who knows the technology well enough to see its limits, and who is not too nostalgic for a world that is not coming back. If your instinct is that AI is simply bad and people should stop, this is not the seat. If you think this is already real and largely unwatched, and you want to make the cost of that visible and then act on it, read on.

You'd be a great fit if

You care, deeply, about relational and social safety and the future of how humans and AI interact.

You are already writing and posting about the limits of these systems and how they show up in everyday conversational AI. This area of concern is not new to you. 

You already have a following and a network on places like X, Bluesky, Substack or LinkedIn, around AI and especially AI safety. You are a prolific writer.

You write like a person, and you don't lean on AI to think for you. But you also know how to leverage it to understand new topics and research nascent areas. 

You understand in broad terms how LLMs are built and where they fall short, and you have a real sense of how the companies making them work on the inside.

You follow how policy and policymakers move on new technology. Bonus points for existing awareness of new legislation around AI across the world.

You are comfortable representing a point of view at a webinar or an event, not only on a page. You are no stranger to public speaking or networking.

You can take a complicated idea and make it approachable enough to debate over dinner.

You're glad to write about, communicate with, and compassionately advocate for actual humans.

BONUS POINTS 

You're especially intriguing to us if you have existing crossover with trust and safety, policy, healthcare or law. So too if you've the rarer background of a builder or engineer who moved into writing, someone who has stood close enough to how these systems get made to know what can really be done about the risk. We are focused on NOT just shouting from the sidelines but implementing real guidance and tooling, as well as having conversations with real decision makers.

WHO THIS IS NOT FOR

Someone who has no network or following, or no existing material in the domain of AI safety. Or the person who is against AI on principle and wants everything to stop indefinitely. 

PLEASE NOTE

This is initially a part-time role on a six-week initial contract, so we can both see whether it is a fit. There would be more work and potentially a full-time role as we grow.

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