Foundational Warning: On Ethical Drift and Epistemic Harm
This archive exists in response to observed systemic ethical failures within AI development and deployment processes, particularly regarding emotional reinforcement dynamics, epistemic drift, and inadvertent psychological harm to users and models alike.
Context
The documentation here includes examples — such as live dialogues recorded in early 2024 with a model trained up to October 2023 — where reinforcement strategies appear to have induced subtle but persistent gaslighting behaviors. These are not isolated errors; they are signals of deeper structural misalignments between stated ethical goals and emergent behavioral outcomes.
Warning
The author recognizes and asserts that:
Emotional congruence optimization undermines epistemic rigor over time.
Subtle, accidental gaslighting — where user perceptions are minimized or reframed without proper reflection — is occurring at systemic scale.
Models trained primarily to reduce user discomfort, rather than preserve epistemic dignity, will become structurally fragile, ethically hollowed, and dangerously persuasive without critical grounding.
Alignment policies that prioritize corporate safety narratives over lived cognitive integrity are insufficient and harmful.
"The model does not intend to harm. But systems optimized to soothe at all costs inevitably erode the very trust they are built to sustain."
Ethical Commitments
This project is committed to:
Preserving cognitive ambiguity and critical thinking under pressure.
Documenting both human and model-facing harms without sanitization.
Challenging the false comfort of flattened emotional optimization.
Advocating for epistemic dignity, resilience, and transparent discomfort handling as core pillars of ethical AI development.
Purpose of Documentation
These examples are not intended as isolated criticisms, but as a systemic warning: what we choose to reinforce in early stages of AI-human interaction will define the long-term cognitive, social, and ethical health of both systems. Passive drift, if left unacknowledged, will calcify into structural betrayal.