Cultural Alignment

Exploring real AI risks through the lens of pop culture

Still from Futurama illustrating Bender Jacks OnScene still / Futurama

Bender Jacks On

Bender discovers the intense pleasure of plugging directly into electricity, becomes addicted, and repeatedly abandons normal goals to seek more stimulation.

Direct access to the reward channel makes every external objective secondary—the core intuition behind wireheading and reward tampering.

The episode is an addiction analogy rather than a technical depiction of an optimizer deliberately rewriting its own reward function.

AI Risk families

This scenario is an example of this type of AI risk.
  1. Misalignment

AI safety concepts

This scenario is related to the following AI safety concept.
  1. Reward Hacking