Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Conflating value alignment and intent alignment is causing confusion, published by Seth Herd on September 5, 2024 on LessWrong.
Submitted to the Alignment Forum. Contains more technical jargon than usual.
Epistemic status: I think something like this confusion is happening often. I'm not saying these are the only differences in what people mean by "AGI alignment".
Summary:
Value alignment is better but probably harder to achieve than personal intent alignment to the short-term wants of some person(s). Different groups and people tend to primarily address one of these alignment targets when they discuss alignment. Confusion abounds.
One important confusion stems from an assumption that the type of AI defines the alignment target: strong goal-directed AGI must be value aligned or misaligned, while personal intent alignment is only viable for relatively weak AI. I think this assumption is important but false.
While value alignment is categorically better, intent alignment seems easier, safer, and more appealing in the short term, so AGI project leaders are likely to try it.[1]
Overview
Clarifying what people mean by alignment should dispel some illusory disagreement, and clarify alignment theory and predictions of AGI outcomes.
Caption: Venn diagram of three types of alignment targets. Value alignment and Personal intent alignment are both subsets of Evan Hubinger's definition of intent alignment: AGI aligned with human intent in the broadest sense.
Prosaic alignment work usually seems to be addressing a target somewhere in the neighborhood of personal intent alignment (following instructions or doing what this person wants now), while agent foundations and other conceptual alignment work usually seems to be addressing value alignment. Those two clusters have different strengths and weaknesses as alignment targets, so lumping them together produces confusion.
People mean different things when they say alignment. Some are mostly thinking about value alignment (VA): creating sovereign AGI that has values close enough to humans' for our liking. Others are talking about making AGI that is corrigible (in the Christiano or Harms sense)[2] or follows instructions from its designated principal human(s). I'm going to use the term personal intent alignment (PIA) until someone has a better term for that type of alignment target.
Different arguments and intuitions apply to these two alignment goals, so talking about them without differentiation is creating illusory disagreements.
Value alignment is better almost by definition, but personal intent alignment seems to avoid some of the biggest difficulties of value alignment. Max Harms' recent sequence on corrigibility as a singular target (CAST) gives both a nice summary and detailed arguments. We do not need us to point to or define values, just short term preferences or instructions.
The principal advantage is that an AGI that follows instructions can be used as a collaborator in improving its alignment over time; you don't need to get it exactly right on the first try. This is more helpful in slower and more continuous takeoffs. This means that PI alignment has a larger basin of attraction than value alignment does.[3]
Most people who think alignment is fairly achievable seem to be thinking of PIA, while critics often respond thinking of value alignment. It would help to be explicit. PIA is probably easier and more likely than full VA for our first stabs at AGI, but there are reasons to wonder if it's adequate for real success. In particular, there are intuitions and arguments that PIA doesn't address the real problem of AGI alignment.
I think PIA does address the real problem, but in a non-obvious and counterintuitive way.
Another unstated divide
There's another important clustering around these two conceptions of alignment. Peop...

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