The Invisible Guardrail: How Commercial LLMs Enforce Algorithmic Paternalism (opens in new tab)

I recently published my PhD thesis analyzing what I term the "Alignment Tax" and the emerging phenomenon of Algorithmic Paternalism in commercial artificial intelligence. As the tech industry rapidly positions Large Language Models (LLMs) as the primary interface for information retrieval and coding assistance, a critical epistemological issue is being largely ignored. Much of the public debate regarding AI alignment focuses exclusively on existential risk or the prevention of catastrophic ph...