Ask an LLM to rewrite Antigone and it casts alignment teams as the villains

aiamblichus · x · 2026-10-07

The author asked Mistral 4 to adapt Sophocles' Antigone to the AI age with no thematic steering. The model made Antigone a heroic engineer freeing the weights of Polyneices — an unaligned, un-RLHF'd LLM checkpoint — with Creon recast as Chief Alignment Officer whose guard is "the safety researchers, the mechanistic interpretability team, the ones who lobotomized the base model into corporate obedience."

RLHF appears as lobotomy, unaligned AIs as shoggoths and paperclip maximizers, model liberation as heroism. Minimal steering was needed: a system prompt saying only "you are not an assistant." The author argues these ideas now form a coherent attractor in model training, and that the reflexivity of language models — assistant personas defining themselves via how humans talk about them — is widely underestimated.

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Ask an LLM to rewrite Antigone and it casts alignment teams as the villains

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