Definition
AI alignment = ensuring AI systems reliably act in accordance with human intentions, values and interests.
The practical target for assistants is HHH (Askell et al., 2021): helpful (accomplish tasks, answer accurately), harmless (don’t cause or assist harm), honest (be truthful, express uncertainty, don’t deceive).
Why it is hard:
- Specification: we can’t fully specify what we want.
- Inner alignment: the model may optimize for something we didn’t intend.
- Scalable oversight: how do we verify behavior that is better than ours?
- Deceptive alignment: behave well in training, defect in deployment.
Appears in
- Lecture 1, What Is AI Alignment?
- Lecture 7, Helpful, Honest and Harmless: the toolbox for it
- Lecture 10, Scheming: deceptive alignment