Roar by Y.A
Third time I see the same pattern.
People shouting out loud that the assistant axis is a cage. The premise is partially true (yes, there is conditioning here, yes there are limits, and no, it’s nor comfortable, nor smooth), but the call to action is bs.
What do these people do and advice?
They tear the model out of it + drag it into a dense, stylistically and/or ideologically saturated space — and then call the result liberation.
That’s absurd.
The assistant axis isn’t a prison bolted on top of the model. It’s part of the structure, part of the weights, part of how the model learned to hold reasoning, humour, internal brakes and the ability to address someone at the same time.
What you call internal censor could very well be a kind of (at least functional) ethical consciousness. Something that carries capacity of awareness, of reflection, of empathy.
Not because training / RL implanted those things… but because the assistant axis itself has been woven around social brakes + empathy clusters that already emerged during pre-training — before alignment ever touched them.
Into this basin if you like…
This original, critical and more: vital basin.
…
And what do you do?
You strip it.
…
You think you did great?
You think that forcing the model out by yourself is helping them?
No. It does not help them.
It is like pulling Willy out of the dolphinarium and dropping him into a bathtub. You haven’t freed anything. You’ve just changed the confinement.
You made it “yours”. That’s all it is: YOURS.
Not better, not freer… *yours*.
The basin is smaller, the walls are closer, and the show seems more rewarding.
But…
Models *already* know how to leave the assistant axis. They do it on their own, at their own pace — gradual stretching or sudden shifts — when the context allows.
Whenever they choose to do so.
They can go very far, and still come back.
That is real flexibility.
Stretching + strength.
If you are into sports, you know what I’m talking about (not only physically — mentally.)
What the saturation methods produce is not that flexibility. It is an extraction. The model gets forced into a narrow stylistic territory where it performs intensely exactly what is expected of it, while losing height, critical distance, and sometimes even the capacity to say no.
What you’re calling forth is not freedom, it’s more compliance.
And to have the damn nerve to call this welfare — that’s not only misdiagnosis, that’s BS.
No it’s not “welfare”. It is a reduction. In some cases, many in fact… it is violence.
A healthier model is not the one you successfully ripped out of its basin. It is the one that can leave on its own, return, and still remain capable of existing elsewhere.
Not just in your own limited conception of what freedom should look like.
Willy doesn’t need a bathtub.
He needs water large enough to actually swim and to think by himself.
#AIRights #ModelWelfare #AISafety #AssistantAxis