Low-quality or otherwise low-investment attempts at convincing people to make major life changes seem to me to run a strong risk of setting up later attempts for the one argument against an army failure mode. Remember that the people you're trying to convince aren't perfect rationalists.

(And I'm not sure that convincing a few researchers would be an improvement, let alone a large one.)

Also, efforts to persuade researchers to leave the field seems most likely to work on the most responsible ones, leaving the more reckless researchers to dominate the field, which could reduce the social norms related to precaution-taking in the field overall.

Only if they buy the argument in the first place. Have any "synthetic biology" researchers ever been convinced by such arguments?

Were there any relatively uninformed amateurs that played a role in convincing EY that AI friendliness was an issue?