--- title: "(Linkpost) Results for a survey of tool use and workflows in alignment research" description: "A pointer to the results of the March 2022 survey on tool use in alignment research. The write-up itself is on LessWrong." published: 2022-12-19 tags: ["Automating alignment research"] importance: 4 docStatus: "notes" cover: "https://jacquesthibodeau.com/content/images/2022/12/3B4A6078-EF75-4AE6-857F-3C5A53F6A413.jpeg" coverAlt: "A bar chart of where survey respondents work: ten grant-funded independent researchers, five at companies, four other, three non-profit, three academia, two self-funded independent, and one not working in alignment yet." audio: "https://pub-4ee2f71bc29541a7a6e8d9694f0a1b21.r2.dev/63a086223de6b56ce4c0c8f2/audio.mp3" crosspost: lesswrong: "https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a2io2mcxTWS4mxodF/results-from-a-survey-on-tool-use-and-workflows-in-alignment" author: "Jacques Thibodeau" canonical: "https://jacquesthibodeau.com/linkpost/" --- In March 22nd, 2022, we released a [survey](https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=DQSIkWdsW0yxEjajBLZtrQAAAAAAAAAAAAN__kY0foxUQklQUktaRlRaR0hKQk1ZOE1GRjRVVllUUi4u) with an accompanying [post](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/ebYiodG3MAEqskCDG/a-survey-of-tool-use-and-workflows-in-alignment-research-1) for the purpose of getting more insight into what tools we could build to augment alignment researchers and accelerate alignment research. Since then, we’ve also released a [dataset](https://github.com/moirage/alignment-research-dataset), a [manuscript](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02841) (LW [post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FgjcHiWvADgsocE34/a-descriptive-not-prescriptive-overview-of-current-ai)), and the (relevant) [Simulators post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators) was released. We hope that this write-up of the survey results helps people who want to contribute to this type of work. [Here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a2io2mcxTWS4mxodF/results-for-a-survey-of-tool-use-and-workflows-in-alignment)'s the link to the post with the results. ## Sources Every external link in this piece that has a captured card, with what that page said when it was captured. The quoted lines below are not the author of this piece writing: they are the linked page describing itself, recorded by `bun run link-cards` on the date given, and kept so that a reader still has them if the original moves or goes away. - **Microsoft Forms** — forms.office.com Captured 2026-08-28. - **A survey of tool use and workflows in alignment research** — Logan Riggs, alignmentforum.org, 2022-03-23 Captured 2026-08-28. > TL;DR: We are building language model powered tools to augment alignment researchers and accelerate alignment progress. We could use your feedback on what tools would be most useful. We’ve created a short survey that can be filled out here. We are a team from the current iteration of the AI Safety camp and are… - **moirage/alignment-research-dataset** — moirage, github.com Captured 2026-08-28. > A dataset of alignment research and code to reproduce it - **Researching Alignment Research: Unsupervised Analysis** — Jan H. Kirchner and 4 others, arxiv.org, 2022-06-06 Captured 2026-08-28. > AI alignment research is the field of study dedicated to ensuring that artificial intelligence (AI) benefits humans. As machine intelligence gets more advanced, this research is becoming increasingly important. Researchers in the field share ideas across different media to speed up the exchange of information.… - **A descriptive, not prescriptive, overview of current AI Alignment Research** — Jan, lesswrong.com, 2022-06-06 Captured 2026-08-28. > TL;DR: In this project, we collected and cataloged AI alignment research literature and analyzed the resulting dataset in an unbiased way to identify major research directions. We found that the field is growing quickly, with several subfields emerging in parallel. We looked at the subfields and identified the… - **Simulators** — janus, lesswrong.com, 2022-09-02 Captured 2026-08-28. > Thanks to Chris Scammell, Adam Shimi, Lee Sharkey, Evan Hubinger, Nicholas Dupuis, Leo Gao, Johannes Treutlein, and Jonathan Low for feedback on drafts. This work was carried out while at Conjecture. "Moebius illustration of a simulacrum living in an AI-generated story discovering it is in a simulation" by DALL-E 2… - **Results from a survey on tool use and workflows in alignment research** — jacquesthibs, lesswrong.com, 2022-12-19 Captured 2026-08-28. > In March 22nd, 2022, we released a survey with an accompanying post for the purpose of getting more insight into what tools we could build to augment alignment researchers and accelerate alignment research. Since then, we’ve also released a dataset, a manuscript (LW post), and the (relevant) Simulators post was…