The Alignment Myth

"A book my parents could read that also sharpened how I do my own technical work. Campbell shows that the gap between the alignment we were promised and the one we got isn't hidden in the machine - it's in us. His 'Alignment Myth' framework gave me a genuinely new set of tools I use in my research and in my classroom."

- George Williams, Professor of Data Science, University of San Francisco and Chief AI Scientist, Ansible AI

Artificial intelligence has entered daily life for hundreds of millions of people. It speaks with confidence, authority, and something that resembles insight itself. But what exactly are we interacting with?

George Campbell takes readers inside the strange intersection between humans and Al.

Part tech explainer, part psychology investigation, and part guide to the politics and economics of the Al industry, Campbell explains why conversational Al behaves the way it does, why humans respond to it so naturally, and why the technology so often feels right while getting things wrong. Neither utopian nor apocalyptic, The Alignment Myth is a framework for understanding one of the most important technological shifts of modern life and your own relationship to it.

The mechanisms are not hidden. Once you know where to look, you can't stop seeing them.