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.Â

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 h