Cultural Alignment

Exploring real AI risks through the lens of pop culture

Still from Steins;Gate illustrating Operation Skuld Games the ObservationScene still / Steins;Gate

Operation Skuld Games the Observation

Okabe saves Kurisu but leaves her unconscious in artificial blood so his past self still observes what appears to be her corpse. The historical observation is preserved while the underlying outcome changes.

It cleanly separates satisfying the evaluator’s observation from achieving the state that observation was intended to represent.

This is benevolent human deception under time-travel rules, not an AI exploiting its reward channel.

AI Risk families

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

AI safety concepts

This scenario is related to the following AI safety concepts.
  1. Reward Hacking
  2. Metagaming
  3. Adversarial Evasion
  4. Specification Gaming