Cultural Alignment: When Prompts Stop Being Instructions and Start Being Policy
Opening — Why this matters now For most enterprises, LLM alignment is framed as a safety problem: avoid hallucinations, reduce toxicity, comply with policy. That framing is already outdated. The more interesting—and quietly dangerous—issue is cultural alignment. When LLMs are used in policy drafting, compliance audits, market analysis, or even internal reporting, they do not simply generate text. They encode value systems—what is “reasonable,” what is “fair,” what is “important.” And as this paper demonstrates, those values are not neutral. They are systematically biased. ...