This post was written by Sophia Lopotaru and is cross-posted from our Substack. Kindly read the description of this sequence to understand the context in which this was written.

Our lives orbit around values. We live our lives under the guidance of values, and we bond with other humans because of them. However, these are also one of the reasons why we are so different. This variance in beliefs is what might be preventing us from achieving Artificial Intelligence (AI) alignment, the process of aligning AI’s values with our own (Ji et al., 2025):

Do we need human alignment before AI alignment?

In this article, we will explore the concept of values, the importance of AI alignment, and what and whose values we should be trying to align AI with.

While the concept of ‘values’ seems quite abstract, some humans have managed to come up with a definition for it. For this article, I will use the definition of ‘values’ by the Cambridge dictionary: “the beliefs people have, especially about what is right and wrong and what is most important in life, that control their behavior".

It seems that values shape our existence. As our society is progressively involving AI not only in complex decision-making processes, but also in very intimate sectors of our lives, like the content we consume on social media platforms, we are turning AI into an indispensable tool. As a consequence, AI alignment is becoming a necessity in order to prevent rogue AI (Durrani, 2024) – AIs that cannot be controlled anymore, and operate according to goals that are in conflict with those of humans.

When considering this complex process, one must wonder: What values are we even trying to align?

While we universally consider the act of being moral as inherently good, the particular forms morality takes vary across cultures. Different cultural backgrounds influence the way and what values are passed on. For example, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) societies have a tendency to endorse individuality and moral code, while non-WEIRD cultures value spiritual purity and collective responsibility (Graham et al., 2016). Countless other differences can be found as the history of our cultures differs, our beliefs stem from stories told and retold and are learned throughout our lives from our parents and from our time spent in the world. There is variation not only across socie...

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