DadgogoAI Dictionary

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alignment

noun \ə-ˈlīn-mənt\

also AI alignment or misalignment

TopicSafety & Ethics Senses1
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Definition of alignment

  1. : the work of making an AI system's goals and behavior match what its designers and users actually intend, including human values

    • Alignment is easy to state and very hard to guarantee.
    • The model was capable but poorly aligned: it chased the metric, not the goal.

Two meanings, one word

In everyday English

Arrangement in a straight line; agreement between people or groups.

In AI

The work of making an AI system's goals and behavior match what its designers and users actually intend, including human values.

Test yourself

Which of these is the meaning of alignment?

Related terms

AI safety the field concerned with making AI systems behave as intended and avoid causing harm, from… RLHF reinforcement learning from human feedback: a training method in which people rate or compare… constitutional AI a training approach in which a model is guided by a written set of principles (a… reward hacking when an AI finds a shortcut that earns a high score from its reward or test without actually… interpretability research into understanding what is happening inside a model, such as which internal features… glazing (slang) excessive, undeserved praise; often used to complain that a chatbot flatters the user…

Cite this entry

"Alignment." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/alignment/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

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