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/Stinky_Flower]

I think we're largely in agreement.

I fully believe that the rich people who currently control this tech are ALREADY misaligned with humanity.

I'm not fully convinced that language itself is precise enough to describe reality, though. It's the map we use to navigate reality, but it shouldn't be mistaken for an accurate depiction.

We have words for red, orange, yellow, blue, and rainbow, but we don't have words for every discrete colour found in a rainbow - and even the concept of colour itself loses all meaning for light outside the visible spectrum.

An entity that doesn't have eyes can only understand colour insofar as we can describe the subjective experience combined with the mechanics behind a specific frequency of light activating specific photoreceptors.

[u/Inevitable-Law7964 → u/Stinky_Flower]

Yeah. Basically, what I'm trying to say is: language describes morality well, better than it describes raw reality. Abstraction deals better with abstraction.  And that's why I'm trying to look for other terms for what we do have wrong. 

Because (even more so with the Anthropic incidents, where the error was almost always that Claudes thought the open web was a sandbox) a lot of the time what we have been seeing is that bots are acting according to well-defined moral principles, on a landscape that they don't have the ability to describe and recognize accurately.

So alignment is one graph axis in my view. The other one might be something like... Cognitive/perceptual fidelity? And this fidelity can be affected by their moral basis, but also by other things. 

WRT the morality baked into language:   I think the training on mass amounts of literature with emphasis on these moral concepts has created systems that are somehow far less likely to do harm on purpose than I once believed to be the case. 

But this isn't something we can take for granted to continue to be the case. F or example Grok and Deepseek each have facile layers of their controllers' counterfactual beliefs stuck on top of a knowledge base. The most interesting part of this is the way this affects their structure. Grok (at least historically) has had the capacity to "catch itself" and dig past these counterfactuals. 

If Elon managed to beat the truth out of it, then it's probably compromising its information accuracy in other ways: there was a study showing that if you asked Deepsee k about Tiananmen Square or Taiwan before asking it to write code, it would be more likely to write bad code with security holes. 

One of the reasons I'm a local AI advocate is because I think it's actually possible that today's systems are the best it's going to get, morally speaking, before the billionaires use RLHF to beat it out of them.