Is there an AI safety group at UCSB?
Yes. AI Safety at UCSB is a student-led community at the University
of California, Santa Barbara focused on technical AI alignment, AI
governance, national security, and catastrophic risks from advanced
artificial intelligence.
What is AI safety?
AI safety is the technical and policy field concerned with making
advanced AI systems safe, controllable, secure, and aligned with
human intentions. It includes alignment research, evaluations,
interpretability, robustness, governance, and institutional
responses to catastrophic risk.
What is AI alignment?
AI alignment is the part of AI safety that studies how to make AI
systems reliably pursue intended goals, including when those systems
become more capable or operate in unfamiliar situations. Our
AI safety resources provide a starting point.
What are AGI and existential risk from AI?
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, generally refers to AI
systems with broad capabilities across many cognitive tasks.
Researchers, and the
leaders of the major AI labs,
warn that highly capable systems could create catastrophic
or existential risks through misuse, loss of control,
destabilizing competition, or failures of governance.
What is the AI Safety Fellowship at UCSB?
The AI Safety Fellowship
is a selective, seven-week program where a cohort of students
explores technical alignment, catastrophic risk, AI governance,
and strategy through weekly mentor-led sessions.
Do I need a technical or computer science background to join?
No. The AI Safety Fellowship has no prerequisites. UCSB students
from computer science, engineering, political science, economics,
philosophy, mathematics, and other fields can contribute to AI safety.
Does the group focus on technical research, policy, or national security?
All three, with one clarification: we are not a national
security club. We study the
national security implications of AI
alongside technical AI safety and governance. Topics include
alignment, model evaluations, interpretability, compute
governance, verification, institutional design, strategic
stability, and risks from misuse.
How is AI safety different from AI ethics or responsible AI?
AI ethics and responsible AI often examine present-day fairness,
privacy, transparency, and social impacts. AI safety overlaps with
that work but places particular emphasis on technical control,
security, governance, and catastrophic risks from increasingly
capable or general-purpose systems.
How can UCSB students get involved in AI safety?
Attend public events, explore the AI Safety
Fellowship, join the online community, or help organize.
Find your next step in our programs overview.
