Position: The Alignment Community is Unintentionally Building a Censor's Toolkit

Abstract

arXiv:2608.12346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This position paper argues that modern AI alignment methods - originally designed to prevent harmful output - are dual-use technologies that may easily be misused by malicious actors for censorship and manipulation. By mapping current alignment techniques to the possibility and actual cases of misuse, we show that the quest for a "perfectly aligned" model inadvertently also provides malicious actors with an ever-improving tool for informational dom