Emergent alignment and the projectability of ethical personas
Work on `emergent misalignment' shows that finetuning LLMs on narrow tasks can induce broadly misaligned behavior. This supports the `persona selection' (PSM) hypothesis: during pre-training, LLMs learn to simulate different characters/perspectives, which can be elicited and refined during post-training. This paper investigates the converse phenomenon, `emergent alignment', and uses it to support and refine the PSM and motivate a novel desideratum for alignment. We finetune a helpful-only model on broad and narrow safety tasks. To create SFT samples, we follow the `Constitutional AI' (CAI) approach and use four constitutions which encode reasonable alignment strategies: deontology, conseq...
| Authors | Guillermo Del Pinal, Youngchan Lee, Calum McNamara et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 8 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
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