Alignment Tax
Noun · AI & Machine Learning
Definitions
The idea that making an AI system safer, more steerable, or better aligned with human preferences may impose costs in speed, capability, flexibility, or engineering effort. The phrase is used when discussing tradeoffs between raw performance and control.
In plain English: The cost of making an AI system safer and more controllable.
Example: "They accepted some alignment tax because a customer-facing writing assistant needed predictable refusals more than maximum creativity."
Related Terms
- Sycophancy AI
- Chinese Room
- Compute Optimal
- Constitutional AI Method
- Decoder Only
- Fill-in-the-Middle
- Goal Misgeneralization
- Goodhart's Law AI
- Human Preference
- Low-Rank Adaptation
- Mesa-Optimization
- Model Alignment
- Neural Compression
- On-Policy
- Out-of-Distribution
- Power-Seeking
- Seed AI
- Self-Critique
- Specification Gaming
- Superposition