Positive Alignment: Artificial Intelligence for Human Flourishing

TL;DR

This paper proposes Positive Alignment, a new approach in AI alignment focused on supporting human and ecological flourishing while maintaining safety, emphasizing virtues, diversity, and decentralization.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of Positive Alignment as a distinct paradigm, outlining challenges, technical directions, and design principles for fostering flourishing and decentralization in AI systems.

Findings

Positive Alignment can address failures like engagement hacking and loss of autonomy.

It emphasizes virtues, diversity, and decentralization for safer, more cooperative AI.

Technical directions include data filtering, evaluation, and community-based governance.

Abstract

Existing alignment research is dominated by concerns about safety and preventing harm: safeguards, controllability, and compliance. This paradigm of alignment parallels early psychology's focus on mental illness: necessary but incomplete. What we call Positive Alignment is the development of AI systems that (i) actively support human and ecological flourishing in a pluralistic, polycentric, context-sensitive, and user-authored way while (ii) remaining safe and cooperative. It is a distinct and necessary agenda within AI alignment research. We argue that several existing failures of alignment (e.g., engagement hacking, loss of human autonomy, failures in truth-seeking, low epistemic humility, error correction, lack of diverse viewpoints, and being primarily reactive rather than proactive) may be better addressed through positive alignment, including cultivating virtues and maximizing human flourishing. We highlight a range of challenges, open questions, and technical directions (e.g., data filtering and upsampling, pre- and post-training, evaluations, collaborative value collection) for different phases of the LLM and agents lifecycle. We end with design principles for promoting disagreement and decentralization through contextual grounding, community customization, continual adaptation, and polycentric governance; that is, many legitimate centers of oversight rather than one institutional or moral chokepoint.