LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Should AI Developers Remove Discussion of AI Misalignment from AI Training Data?” by Alek Westover


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There is some concern that training AI systems on content predicting AI misalignment will hyperstition AI systems into misalignment. This has been discussed previously by a lot of people: Anna Salamon, Alex Turner, the AI Futures Project, Miles Kodama, Gwern, Cleo Nardo, Richard Ngo, Rational Animations, Mark Keavney and others.

In this post, I analyze whether AI developers should filter out discussion of AI misalignment from training data. I discuss several details that I don't think have been adequately covered by previous work:

  • I give a concrete proposal for what data to filter.
  • I discuss options for how to do this without making the AIs much worse at helping with research on AI misalignment.


My evaluation of this proposal is that while there are some legitimate reasons to think that this filtering will end up being harmful, it seems to decrease risk meaningfully in expectation. So, I [...]

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Outline:

(02:15) What data to filter

(04:13) Why filtering AI villain data reduces risk from misaligned AI

(07:25) Downsides of filtering AI villain data

(10:30) Finer details of filtering AI villain data

(10:50) How to make filtering and having AI do/aid safety work compatible?

(13:50) What model should the lab externally deploy?

(16:51) Conclusion

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First published:

October 23rd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6DfWFtL7mcs3vnHPn/should-ai-developers-remove-discussion-of-ai-misalignment

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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