, the night in 1814 in Baltimore that America fought back the invaders at Fort McHenry and "The Star-Spangled Banner" was born. New invader. Victory required.
helps organizations and AI safety brands reach the one audience that can actually change the outcome: everyone who isn't yet paying enough attention. A strategy, production, and execution agency working to lower P(doom), with films, out-of-home, and social content that reach everyday people, plus the positioning, podcast production, staffing, and coaching to back it up.
Led by John Sherman, sits where the AI safety world meets everyone else. John spent his early career as a journalist, winning the Peabody and the duPont-Columbia. He became an Emmy and Addy Award-winning creative director in advertising, building Storyfarm into its 20th year in Baltimore. Today he works in AI extinction-risk communications, alongside the team behind the AI Risk Network and the For Humanity and Warning Shots podcasts. His mission is simple: connect the messages and the messengers of AI risk to the audience that actually decides the outcome, the general public.
Passion and urgency meet expert execution. We're already working with organizations doing serious work on AI risk.
Interim communications leadership for David Krueger's AI-safety advocacy nonprofit: building the comms function, hiring the permanent team, and shaping how the mission reaches the public. Ongoing support with strategy, creative direction, podcast, and media production.
Senior Communications Consultant
Strategic consulting, podcast production, and creative support for Jeremie and Edouard Harris and their team at the AI risk and national-security firm behind landmark government-commissioned work. Helping bring their warning to a wider public via the new podcast The Endgame.
Communications & creative
AI SafetyWorking with Changlin Li and his team to produce a 7-minute video, shown to police and clergy, on the broken system of AI from data centers to extinction risk. Hosted and written by John Sherman, it debuted to live audiences in October 2026.
Video production takes two decades of Storyfarm's craft, the kind that moves everyday Americans, and points it at the urgent communications needs of AI safety. Here's what that looks like: concepts built to make the risk impossible to ignore.
We have enough white papers.
AI safety needs billboards.
Sometime in the last few years, every brand, consultant, and LinkedIn post discovered "storytelling." We've been doing it professionally for nearly three decades, long before it was a buzzword on a pitch deck.
Storytelling isn't decoration. It's the mechanism. It's how you change a mind, how you make an abstract risk feel real enough to act on, and how you reach the people who will never read the white paper. That's not a tagline for us, it's a craft we've spent a career perfecting, with the highest awards in the business to prove it.
The field's best ideas are trapped in expert language. Translation is the whole job, here's what it looks like.
"Sufficiently advanced systems may develop instrumental subgoals that are misaligned with human oversight mechanisms, presenting nontrivial loss-of-control risk as capabilities scale."
We're building something smarter than us. Nobody knows how to turn it off.
Both sentences are true. Only one of them works at a kitchen table in Ohio. Writing the second kind is the whole craft, and it's the one we've spent a career perfecting.
We figure out what needs to be said, then we make, staff, and coach whatever it takes to say it. Two disciplines, one shop, so the thinking and the making never come apart.
The thinking everything else hangs on. We work with you to figure out what you stand for, who you're talking to, and how the pieces connect, before a dollar goes into production.
Communications strategy, positioning, and theory of change for organizations whose mission is ahead of their public voice. We map the gap and the path across it together.
Everything downstream of the strategy, creative, people, capability. Different outputs, one instinct: produce the thing, don't just advise on it.
Our anchor craft. Films, out-of-home, social, primers, interactive, rapid response, award-winning storytelling built to make AI risk legible and worth caring about, on Main Street, not just the timeline.
We build communications functions and fill them, from interim comms leadership while you hire, to sourcing, assessing, and onboarding the permanent team. Many AI safety orgs tell us they're not sure what makes a good communications hire. We can help with that.
Founder and leadership communications coaching for people who need to be credible in public without sounding rehearsed. Media prep, message discipline, and the confidence to carry a hard message.
Identity, voice, and the systems that keep an organization coherent everywhere it shows up, from name and mark to the templates and guidelines your team runs on.
Most orgs try to solve communications by hiring one junior person and hoping they can do everything. For the same budget, a 9/13/14 retainer gives you a full bench: expert editors, producers, writers, and strategists, cranking out more content, at a faster pace, with far higher production value than any single hire could manage. You get senior firepower on demand, and you only scale it up when you need it.
John Sherman is a Peabody-winning video storyteller who has spent nearly 20 years building Storyfarm into a high-end production and strategy engine. He's also deep in the AI safety ecosystem through The AI Risk Network, including the weekly news-and-analysis podcast Warning Shots. Behind every project is the Storyfarm network: a deep bench of incredible creatives, directors, writers, designers, editors, animators, and strategists, developed over our nearly 20 years and assembled to fit the work. Based in Baltimore rather than Silicon Valley, with a useful outsider's view of how these ideas need to travel.
Start with a free 30-minute call. Get on a Zoom with John and hear his straight take on how your organization shows up in public, where the gaps are, and what he'd do first.
Organizations working on AI risk, governance, evaluation, alignment, and adjacent public-interest work that need more public reach, stronger founder visibility, or a clearer story.
Prefer email? john@storyfarm.com
