AI alignment is a red herring
AI alignment is a red herring 13.18, Saturday 8 Aug 2026 Link to this post The best way to prevent a rogue AGI from processing the Earth into maximum paperclips is to unleash a second AGI that will work to stop it. The problem of ensuring that an AGI doesn’t mulch everything into paperclips by mistake is called alignment. AGI = artificial general intelligence, an AI that exceeds human capability.
- ▪AI alignment is a red herring 13.18, Saturday 8 Aug 2026 Link to this post The best way to prevent a rogue AGI from processing the Earth into maximum paperclips is to unleash a second AGI that will work to stop it.
- ▪The problem of ensuring that an AGI doesn’t mulch everything into paperclips by mistake is called alignment.
- ▪AGI = artificial general intelligence, an AI that exceeds human capability.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Interconnected, a blog by Matt Webb |
| Canonical URL | https://interconnected.org/home/2026/08/08/alignment |
| Publication time | Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:32:53 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-08T16:40:44.000Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-08T16:40:44.000Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 4xL5Irt5aVw8 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI alignment is a red herring 13.18, Saturday 8 Aug 2026 Link to this post The best way to prevent a rogue AGI from processing the Earth into maximum paperclips is to unleash a second AGI that will work to stop it. The problem of ensuring that an AGI doesn’t mulch everything into paperclips by mistake is called alignment. AGI = artificial general intelligence, an AI that exceeds human capability. Alignment = “do what I mean not what I say,” e.g. the instruction “make as many paperclips as possible” (Wikipedia) should result in an efficient factory and does not reasonably mean “use all mass in the universe to do so and kill all humans that attempt to stop me” – even though, technically, that would achieve the goal. Also: being helpful; not being actively malicious; and so on and so forth.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Interconnected, a blog by Matt Webb.
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