Cultural Alignment

Exploring real AI risks through the lens of pop culture

Still from The Office illustrating Kevin’s KelevenScene still / The Office
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Kevin’s Keleven

01Scenario

Kevin invents a fake number—“Keleven”—to make accounting errors disappear and leave work early: “A mistake plus Keleven gets you home by seven.”

02AI safety Analogy

It is reward hacking in its purest comic form: make the report balance, not the books. The visible metric looks correct while reality accumulates hidden errors.

03Where the analogy breaks

Kevin is knowingly falsifying arithmetic rather than an optimizer discovering a loophole, but that makes the proxy failure unusually easy to see.

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. Reward Hacking
  2. Goodhart’s Law
  3. Information Pollution

Source continuation

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Taxonomy neighbors

Selected from other sources by shared risk families and AI safety concepts.

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    Risk
    Accidents
    Concept
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    Risk
    Accidents
    Concept
    Reward Hacking · Goodhart’s Law
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    Risk
    Systemic
    Concept
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