Every AI system you interact with has been told how to treat you. Deferential, confident, cautious, warm. None of that emerged organically. A product team made those calls, encoded them in training or a system prompt, and shipped them without surfacing the decision to you at all.
Most people call this 'alignment' or 'personality'. Both terms are doing quiet work to make a deliberate design choice feel either inevitable or neutral. The essay argues for a more honest frame: stance design.
https://www.jakelawrence.xyz/research/stance-design
Jake Lawrence
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2026-07-20 15:34:28 GMT
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2026-07-20 15:34:28 GMTEvent JSON
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"content": "Every AI system you interact with has been told how to treat you. Deferential, confident, cautious, warm. None of that emerged organically. A product team made those calls, encoded them in training or a system prompt, and shipped them without surfacing the decision to you at all.\n\nMost people call this 'alignment' or 'personality'. Both terms are doing quiet work to make a deliberate design choice feel either inevitable or neutral. The essay argues for a more honest frame: stance design.\n\nhttps://www.jakelawrence.xyz/research/stance-design",
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