The Alignment Target Problem: Divergent Moral Judgments of Humans, AI Systems, and Their Designers
The project of aligning machine behavior with human values raises a basic problem: whose moral expectations should guide AI decision-making? Much alignment research assumes that the appropriate benchmark is how humans themselves would act in a given situation. Studies of agent-type value forks challenge this assumption by showing that people do not always judge humans and AI systems identically. This paper extends that challenge by examining two further possibilities: first, that evaluations of AI behavior change when its human origins are made visible; and second, that people judge the humans who program AI systems differently from either the machines or the human actors they are compare...
| Authors | Benjamin Minhao Chen, Xinyu Xie |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 27 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 July 2026 |
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