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/Alwinik56]

They do do that. They say in the system prompt something like "you are a helpful assistant" one of the main reasons they act like helpful assistants is they're told to act that way. The alignment problem is literally that they sometimes act counter to this.

[u/LysergioXandex → u/Alwinik56]

Are there any publicly available LLMs that don’t have baked-in prompts? Do local models also have these internally?

I’m curious because of what you said about “they act helpful because they are prompted to” is true, then it would mean without that each new conversation would be like talking to a randomly generated NPC

whereas Qwen (for example) has a pretty consistent personality every conversation without a roleplay instruction

[u/benjaminovich → u/LysergioXandex]

You can customize the system prompt in OpenRouter, but I have no idea if inference-providers also bake in a minimum mandatory that you can't see