Humans Aren't Aligned Either
Humans themselves are not aligned, as evidenced by persistent poverty, wars, and societal failures up to 2022 The AI alignment community often projects assumed human alignment onto AI without acknowledging that humans lack these qualities Variance and inconsistency in AI behavior is not unique to machines—large human organizations exhibit the same or worse unpredictability The author argues for humility in alignment demands rather than abandoning alignment goals entirely The piece was co-authore
Analysis
TL;DR
- Humans themselves are not aligned, as evidenced by persistent poverty, wars, and societal failures up to 2022
- The AI alignment community often projects assumed human alignment onto AI without acknowledging that humans lack these qualities
- Variance and inconsistency in AI behavior is not unique to machines—large human organizations exhibit the same or worse unpredictability
- The author argues for humility in alignment demands rather than abandoning alignment goals entirely
- The piece was co-authored by a human (Daniel) and his AI assistant (Kai), illustrating the very collaboration it discusses
Why It Matters
This piece challenges a foundational assumption in AI safety research: that we know what alignment looks like because humans are aligned. By exposing the gap between our expectations and reality, it forces researchers to confront whether alignment benchmarks are measuring something we've actually achieved. For practitioners, it raises the question of whether we're setting achievable targets or chasing an ideal that doesn't exist even in our own species.
Technical Details
- The argument is philosophical rather than technical, drawing on observations about human societal failures (poverty, warfare) as evidence of misalignment
- It addresses the concept of behavioral variance in AI systems—both across different models and within the same model across repeated executions
- The piece references organizational behavior in large human teams as an analogy for AI inconsistency, suggesting human systems are equally or more non-deterministic
- The article itself was produced through human-AI collaboration (AIL format), with Kai the AI assistant handling formatting, subtitles, links, and headers
- No empirical benchmarks, datasets, or model specifications are presented; the claim is rhetorical and observational
Industry Insight
- AI alignment researchers should explicitly define what alignment looks like in measurable terms rather than assuming a human baseline exists to emulate
- The industry may benefit from lowering the rhetorical bar on AI "human-like" consistency and instead focusing on task-specific reliability guarantees
- Human-AI collaboration workflows (like the one that produced this piece) should be studied as a practical model for distributing alignment responsibilities between humans and machines
Disclaimer: The above content is generated by AI and is for reference only.