I’ve been thinking about a possible bridge between AI alignment, reward hacking, and transformational leadership. A lot of AI training seems behaviorally transactional at a simplified level: That makes sense, and I’m not arguing against it. But recent alignment work on reward hacking and emergent misalignment raises a deeper question: are we only shaping outputs, or are we also shaping something like a model’s functional “character”? I don’t mean character in the human-consciousness sense. I’m not claiming models have souls, feelings, or moral agency like humans do. I mean character operationally: stable tendencies that generalize across contexts, especially under pressure, ambiguity, incentives, or temptation. What caught my attention is research suggesting that when models are trained ...
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