Alignment as Jurisprudence
Nicholas Caputo
Why It Matters
What makes this one worth your time
Understanding the intersection of legal theory and AI alignment could lead to more robust AI systems that better conform to human values and legal standards.
The paper draws parallels between jurisprudence and AI alignment to propose a legally-inspired approach to AI decision-making.
Summary
The paper explores the parallels between jurisprudence and AI alignment, suggesting that insights from legal theory can inform AI alignment strategies and vice versa. It discusses the use of legal interpretivism and analogical reasoning in AI alignment, proposing a legally-inspired approach to improve AI's decision-making processes.
Key contributions
- Proposes a conversation between jurisprudence and AI alignment.
- Illustrates the application of legal theories to AI alignment strategies.
Notable insights
- The use of legal interpretivism and analogical reasoning as tools for AI alignment.
- The potential for AI to enhance understanding and improvement of legal systems.
Possible limitations
- Not stated in the abstract
Abstract
arXiv:2605.08416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Jurisprudence, the study of how judges should properly decide cases, and alignment, the science of getting AI models to conform to human values, share a fundamental structure. These seemingly distant fields both seek to predict and shape how decisions by powerful actors, in one case judges and in the other increasingly powerful artificial intelligences, will be made in the unknown future. And they use similar tools of the specification and interpretation of language to try to accomplish those goals. The great debates of jurisprudence, about what the law is and what it should be, can provide insight into alignment, and lessons from what does and does not work in alignment can help make progress in jurisprudence. This essay puts the two fields directly into conversation. Drawing on leading accounts of jurisprudence, particularly Dworkin's principle-oriented interpretivism and Sunstein's positivist account of law as analogical reasoning, and on cutting-edge alignment approaches, namely Constitutional AI and case-based reasoning, it illustrates the value of a more sophisticated legally-inspired approach to the interplay of rules and cases in finetuning alignment and points to ways that AI can provide a better understanding of how the law works and how it can be improved by the introduction of AI. AI systems and the law should operate to empower people to act in the world, helping to expand their capabilities and the extent to which they are able to achieve their goals. As AI continues to improve in capacity, and as the constraints that legal theory places on human judges seem be coming undone, the conversation between these two fields will become increasingly essential and may help point to a better version of both.