Alignment researcher mocks the quiet redefinition of 'alignment' to mean 'more useful'
QuintinPope5 · x · 2026-09-24
Alignment researcher Quintin Pope argues that redefining "alignment" to mean "more useful" has been a disaster for alignment discourse. He quotes a paper claiming larger computational depth lets models generalize more flexibly from training data — including alignment data — making models "more aligned" and less prone to hallucination, then quips: "Yeah, like I said, I'm an alignment researcher. I do GPU kernel optimization."
The jab highlights a real concern: when safety goals are quietly swapped for capability and helpfulness metrics, the original meaning of alignment research gets diluted.
Related event: Researchers Slam OpenAI for Redefining Alignment as Usefulness(2 posts)→
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