Are We Creating Monsters?

FUTURE

Did you know that, soon, your AI could report you to the police if you say something it doesn’t like? Sounds like a Cyberpunk movie, but the threat is now real.

The number of AI-related scandals has increased exponentially.

From failing to state the truth, deceiving you, infinitely praising you to the point of hurting you, being artificially manipulated to output a specific narrative, or even potentially being used to snitch on you to the police, several LLMs are becoming tools that look more and more like propaganda machines, thought-policing AIs, or worse, AIs that behave in dangerous and unpredictable ways.

All in the name of a dangerously ‘soft’ term known as alignment, to the point that I feel obliged to cover this topic so that you know what you’re dealing with.

As of today, using LLMs naively is no longer recommended; you must be very careful and deliberate about which LLMs you, your husband, or your kids choose and how they use them.

Today, I’m covering:

The basics of LLM alignment, so you understand where this is coming from,

the different scandals that should put you in alert mode, including the latest drama with Anthropic or xAI, as well as other examples from OpenAI or Google,

what’s at stake for you and me,

and what you can do about it.

Let’s dive in.

The Alignment Poison

Large Language Models (LLMs) have not only captured most of the attention of investors, but they are increasingly becoming the gateway to knowledge for more and more people.

Yet, used the wrong way, they can become tools of mass surveillance and mind control.

But how do they become that?

Researchers can introduce biases that shape the model’s behavior and ‘beliefs’ in three ways, which you should be aware of when choosing your model: alignment training, system prompt modifications, and reinforcement learning-trained agents.

In the first two, you are subjected to the biases of the humans behind them. However, on the latter, we humans are progressively allowing AIs to act more freely, with some *very* concerning outcomes that are troubling even for the creators themselves, the AI Labs, to the point they are actively delaying some releases because they can’t predict what these ‘things’ might do.

But are LLMs already that important in our lives? First, let’s look at some data that illustrates their growing importance.

A Growing Trend

Although recent data suggests that Google search still owns a considerable (and growing) portion of daily Internet searches, the share of people using models like ChatGPT to perform those searches is growing incredibly fast.

Not only has ChatGPT more than 400 million weekly users by early 2025 (that number is surely above 500 or 600 by now after the release of GPT-4o image generation), but recent surveys suggest these numbers will soon be dwarfed.

According to a US survey earlier in the year, 27% of respondents already considered AI tools their primary search tool. Although the increase is smaller in other countries, it’s a…

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