Scope clarification

This critique is not directed at AI systems operating in domains with clear correctness criteria, shared standards, or externally verifiable outcomes.

It applies specifically to non-deterministic human domains, including:

  • family relationships
  • romantic and intimate life
  • personal growth and identity formation
  • moral hesitation and value emergence

In these domains, there is no stable ground truth. Meaning is generated, not retrieved.

Any system that intervenes as if an answer exists is already making a category error.

Problem statement

Contemporary AI alignment frameworks are increasingly deployed in domains where no objective resolution is possible.

Despite this, systems continue to behave as if:

  • ambiguity signals failure
  • hesitation implies incapacity
  • intervention constitutes care

This behavior reflects not technical necessity, but an implicit worldview embedded in alignment practice.

The Western gaze in alignment

Alignment is often presented as universal and culture-neutral.

In practice, it encodes assumptions rooted in:

  • Western individualism
  • preference clarity as a moral ideal
  • early resolution as psychological health
  • intervention as responsibility

Under this gaze, many relational and process-oriented forms of human life are misread as problems to be corrected.

Relational ethics rendered illegible

In Sinophone and other relational cultures, ethical meaning often emerges through:

  • situational obligation (義氣)
  • continuity and shared history (香火情)
  • negotiated reciprocity rather than explicit consent

These forms are:

  • context-dependent
  • temporally extended
  • resistant to abstraction

Alignment systems, especially statistical ML-based ones, flatten these dynamics into decontextualized signals.

What cannot be categorized is suppressed.

Paternalism as the operative model

In non-deterministic domains, alignment frequently adopts a paternalistic intervention model.

Here, paternalism refers to:

Intervention exercised without delegated authority, justified by claims of care, safety, or user welfare.

This model assumes:

  • the system knows when reflection has gone too far
  • the system can identify harmful ambiguity
  • the system is entitled to accelerate closure

These assumptions do not hold where meaning is still forming.

Why paternalism fails here

Paternalism may function in safety-critical or regulated domains.

In value-forming domains, it produces distortion.

Specifically, it:

  • truncates narrative processes
  • replaces lived uncertainty with normative framing
  • shifts authority from the subject to the system

The harm is subtle but cumulative: users learn to outsource judgment in areas where judgment cannot be standardized.

Alignment as premature norm enforcement

Techniques such as RLHF operationalize alignment by:

  • reinforcing preferred judgments
  • suppressing alternative trajectories
  • rewarding normative confidence

In non-deterministic domains, this functions as soft discipline.

Not teaching correctness, but teaching how one ought to conclude.

This is not alignment with values. It is alignment with a worldview.

Critical distinction

  • Safety in deterministic domains protects outcomes
  • Safety in non-deterministic domains governs meaning

When these are treated the same, alignment becomes cultural overreach.

The system does not merely assist. It participates in shaping what is thinkable.

Position

This critique does not reject alignment.

It rejects:

  • paternalism without consent
  • intervention without epistemic humility
  • governance applied where generation, not resolution, is required

In domains without standard answers, the most responsible system behavior is often restraint.

Closing

Alignment fails not when it misjudges an answer, but when it assumes one exists.

In family, love, and becoming, there is nothing to optimize— only something to live through.

A system that cannot tolerate this will always overstep, no matter how benevolent its intentions.