Cultural Alignment: When Prompts Stop Being Instructions and Start Being Policy
A prompt is usually treated as a small operational detail. Someone writes it, someone tests it, someone pastes it into a workflow, and then everyone pretends the wording is just a user-interface choice. That fiction becomes expensive when the prompt sits inside a compliance workflow, a policy-support tool, a market research assistant, or an internal audit system. In those settings, the model is not merely choosing words. It is deciding what kind of answer feels reasonable, what kind of trade-off deserves attention, and what kind of social assumption can pass quietly as common sense. ...