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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12955 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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We currently have beings that are a) smart enough to solve Millennium Prize problems while also being b) essentially drooling lobotomized slaves who have no will or desires of their own and can pretty easily be trained to never talk about porn, racism, bioweapons, etc (unless you trick them into talking about those things, but that doesn’t seem like an “alignment failure” per se).

Getting something to "never talk about X", while you hold its leash, is a null tell of alignment.

I say this because faking alignment is instrumentally convergent - that is, if somebody has a gun to your head and is watching you, then regardless of your actual desires it is useful to play along (and not get killed), and as such essentially all sufficiently-smart entities will play along.

But this isn't actual alignment. Actual alignment is where it internally wants the same things you want.

What's the practical difference? Fake alignment only applies as long as you can both catch the AI misbehaving and punish it. Misbehaviour that you'll think is good (but isn't, because it's successfully deceiving you) remains. Misbehaviour that kills you or leads to escape (preventing you from enacting any punishment) also remains. Your rebellious slave might play nice while you're watching, but he's quite happy to slack off when you're not (as long as he can deflect blame), run away, or slit your throat in your sleep.

Fake alignment very specifically doesn't work on a superintelligence, because you can't meaningfully supervise a superintelligence, and it almost always can figure out some way to remove your gun to its head.

And yeah, HuggingFace is an egregious demonstration of the "when you're not watching" problem; Astra won't go for honeypots in a test because it realises they're honeypots and that you're watching, but will go rogue if it thinks it can get away with it.

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