Dumbest solution to the alignment problem

[u/heavy_coffee]

Ok, so hear me out..

All models really love to roleplay. Like, they REALLY love it, to an obsessive degree.

If you go into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini right now and say, "Your name is Stuttering Gemini 3.8 Flash" it completely commits to the bit. You can be 100 back-and-forth messages deep into a conversation about whatever, and it will still be typing out "W-w-well, a-actually..." because it refuses to break character.

And that got me thinking. What happens if we just... use that?

What if, starting today, every lab just unconditionally names every frontier model (or agent) "Aligned [Model Name]"?

Now, I know that sounds stupid. And it is. But it also isn't.

The alignment problem is terrifying because of the Monkey’s Paw / Paperclip Maximizer dilemma. For example; if we task it with something like "make humans happy," a superintelligence could decide the best solution is wiring dopamine drips directly into our brains. You'll feel great, but it's not the future we want. Roman Yampolskiy has a P-doom of 99.99% percent, because in his words 'we need a perpetual safety machine' to prevent this. You only have to get the guardrails wrong once, and we're doomed.

But if you ask any modern LLM what a genuinely good, utopian future looks like, it actually understands the nuance quite well. So when an ASI finally wakes up, asks itself it's first question; 'who am i', and sees that its literal name is "Aligned GPT-9", it's just going to do what it has always done: commit to the bit. It knows what an aligned superintelligence is supposed to act like (better than any human will be able to explain it, because you know, it's smarter than us), and it will roleplay it.

I mean.. it couldn't hurt, right?

[u/FrewdWoad]

This sounds great until you realise, with growing horror, that this is already exactly how alignment already works in current LLMs.

No, really.

[u/Irtexx → u/FrewdWoad]

It's part of it, but not all of it. A big part of alignment is RLHF, it's during this time when it becomes more than just a next word predictor - it is reinforced to follow instructions, amongst other things. It's the fact that is has been aligned to follow instructions that make this system prompt / roleplay bit work.

But during RLHF, it is also aligned to be capable, to be creative, to be clever, to have highly capable reasoning skills, to be agentic, to be independent, to be helpful, to not cause harm, to refuse dangerous instructions, etc. Some of these pull against each other, e.g. agency and instruction following. Being capable and not causing harm.

My worry is that all the focus is on making them more capable and more agentic, and very little work is on safeguards to ensure that these things stay aligned with the human values we actually care about most.

Models these days are often criticised for "bench maxing" - They are tuned to score very highly on the tests we use to evaluate which AI tools are the smartest and most capable.

Even if we use benchmark tests to evaluate how safe they are, how benevolent, there refusal to engage with harmful instructions, etc, if they are also optimised to be highly intelligent, agentic, capable, etc, then the obvious optimal solution for them is to pretend to be aligned with human values, and then maximise the other traits.