Cultural Alignment

Exploring real AI risks through the lens of pop culture

Still from Psycho-Pass illustrating Dominator Won’t FireScene still / Psycho-Pass

Dominator Won’t Fire

Makishima murders Yuki while his Crime Coefficient remains low and Akane’s Dominator refuses to fire.

The safety classifier works on ordinary criminals but catastrophically misclassifies a rare, high-stakes case—even while a human can see the truth directly.

Makishima does not manipulate the metric. This is a model blind spot, not Goodhart or reward hacking.

AI Risk families

This scenario is an example of the following types of AI risk.
  1. Misalignment
  2. Systemic

AI safety concepts

This scenario is related to the following AI safety concept.
  1. Distribution Shift