Cultural Alignment

Exploring real AI risks through the lens of pop culture

Still from The Office illustrating Five Golden Tickets

Five Golden Tickets

Michael hides five 10%-off golden tickets in separate paper boxes, but all five boxes go to the same major customer, creating an accidental 50% discount.

Independent-looking actions become correlated because the deployment pipeline batches them together. The promotion was tested against an imagined distribution that the warehouse process did not produce.

The fiasco happens to win the client’s business, so the operational failure creates a lucky commercial outcome.

AI Risk families

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

AI safety concepts

This scenario is related to the following AI safety concepts.
  1. Deployment Safety
  2. Goodhart’s Law
  3. Algorithmic Monoculture