Katalina Hernandez

• Katalina Hernandez 21 Jul 2026 8:39 UTC

  2 points

  −1

  on: Stop do­ing de­ci­sion the­ory with­out metaphysics

  This is useful. As someone not familiar with decision theory, Newcomb’s problem was super confusing to me when I was asked to answer it (or rather, the point it).

  Stupidly enough, I kept asking whether I should assume Omega is aligned or misaligned XD, “does it want me to get the lesser amount of money so that I don’t donate it to AI Safety?”.

  Otherwise, where’s the choice? If I’m told that if I choose to take both boxes, I WILL not get the million, the whyyyy would I choose to do that?

  And if it’s a perfect predictor of me, how does my answer even matter?

  It’s like if my mum tells me: “If you tidy up your room, I’ll give you $100. If I find out you didn’t, you’re grounded”. This looks like a choice but, as everyone knows, is not (the mum here is also a perfect predictor of me).

  Now, if there was clarity on how I can still exercise control over my circumstances, I guess it’d be clearer that it’s a genuine choice.

  EDIT: I’m explaining my confusion, not claiming I’m right. Would be useful if others explained their disagreement so that I learn 🙏

• Katalina Hernandez 16 Jul 2026 10:58 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: The Halo Defense

  You should probably disagree with me here, but that’s exactly what I mean when I say “x person /​ group selects on vibes (or rather, someone else’s testimony of someone’s “vibes”)” in the context of not having a clear and transparent selection policy.

  I guess halo effect may be something that affects judgment and not necessary for “vibes based selection ”. But I’d find it helpful to clarify my thoughts.

• Katalina Hernandez 15 Jul 2026 14:11 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: clening’s comment on: AI Safety Policy Needs to train Le­gal Practitioners

  Right. I read “ensure compliance”, not “replace CEO’s decision making”. But that’s why I’d think that, as drafted, it seemed that policymakers envisioned this a the position that “makes sure the GDPR is implemented”. But of course it ended up being a position that, as it can only advise, ends up getting ignored and later told “make this compliant ”...

• Katalina Hernandez 15 Jul 2026 12:41 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: clening’s comment on: AI Safety Policy Needs to train Le­gal Practitioners

  I guess the aim of the regulation was to prevent that, though? That’s what I tried to convey. It absolutely is how you say in practice, but I imagine the DPO role was “meant ” to work like Articles 37-39 say...

• Katalina Hernandez 15 Jul 2026 10:06 UTC

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: clening’s comment on: AI Safety Policy Needs to train Le­gal Practitioners

  I’d love it if you did a “diss” style of this post (like you did that one time on Substack) explaining how all of this really depends on regulatory action being credible, courts understanding what they’re dealing with etc. Lesswrong folk seem to care, seeing how many up votes the Quicktake got! 🙏

• Katalina Hernandez 14 Jul 2026 12:08 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: AI Safety Policy Needs to train Le­gal Practitioners

  Not clear it is worth completing burning the AIS communities relationships with the labs (OpenAI might be an exception as that is arguably already burnt).

  I honestly wonder if there are AI Safety researchers working at Frontier labs that would end their relationships with orgs that support litigators with forensic evidence /​ expert witnesses.
  I note that Anthropic’s ongoing suits are in relation to IP and copyright- I would understand AIS researchers not wanting to get involved here at all.

  OpenAI and Character.AI have the largest count of s*uicide and AI Spiralism /​ AI Psychosis related suits (Google has the Gavalas case). Whether or not you think this helps the x-risk agenda, I do not believe is responsible to “look away” when people are dying.

  And, from personal experience, these cases (Raine, Sewell/​Garcia) have enabled productive conversations with policy-makers (you can research “harmful manipulation, EU AI Act” and hopefully see the importance of this cases in policy, but I suspect you’d be more open if you hear it from a policy org).
  
  Also: I am aware that there are members of this community that work at OpenAI (even if “already burnt”) and do try their best to do the right thing. Their legal team’s litigation practices have been questionable, but I agree it’s important to care for relationships with aligned individuals- I admire those people at Labs who have taken a stance.

• Katalina Hernandez 12 Jul 2026 19:00 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: AI Safety Policy Needs to train Le­gal Practitioners

  I am more of a mid-termist, which I should have said more clearly. I am also looking at it from a less US-centric perspective than usual...
  
  The lawsuits are already happening: https://​​ailawsuittracker.com/​​companies/​​ and unfortunately, are the only way for people to get any redress. So, I cannot (in good conscience) treat these cases as “collateral damage” in favour of focusing on short timelines. Also consider how much of a conversation opener it has been for policy orgs that they can point at real incidents, such as the Adam Raine case, when defending why we need stronger regulation of AI and AI companies.
  
  I do agree that folk that work at Labs for a while and resign have better chances /​ legibility in the future.

• Katalina Hernandez 12 Jul 2026 18:33 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: AI Safety Policy Needs to train Le­gal Practitioners

  Lawyers working at Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google or Meta, are as compromised /​ able OR unable to influence things as AI engineers or technical staff at said companies.
  
  Lawyers working on Law Firms advising big tech, telcos, large operators, banks or investment funds (or in-house counsel) with deep pockets can be influenced: because they need to look after the best interest of their client.
  
  If we sell the concept that “you’re serving your client the best by telling them to deploy the safest AIs”, then we’re steering money away from AI companies that choose to move away from safety research…
  
  On the other hand: the lawyers that are representing people suing said companies for AI harms (e.g. Adam Raine’s parents) must and should be assisted by the community^[1].

  1. ^

     I am very grateful precisely to Center for Humane Technology for the support they gave to Adam’s parents during this litigation process.

• Katalina Hernandez 11 Jul 2026 21:31 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: AI Safety Policy Needs to train Le­gal Practitioners

  Do you mean in general or in this post? If the latter, I was hoping that the irony was more obvious?

• Katalina Hernandez 10 Jul 2026 11:42 UTC

  90 points

  16

  on: Katal­ina Her­nan­dez’s Shortform

  You attend an “AI Governance” conference.

  An AI safety policy speaker, from an organisation that does policy research (likely someone adjacent to the EA space), talks about:

  • Stronger regulation for AI beyond human capability

  • Loss of control

  • Bans, treaties, and international cooperation

  Then, the industry panelist speaks. Someone affiliated to something called the “International Association of Privacy Professionals” (or IAPP), who you never heard of before but apparently have a lot of pull.
  
  They talk about:

  • High-Risk AI system classification under the EU AI Act (employment, banking) and biometric data processing

  • The importance of an AI use case inventory

  • Trackers.

  • Which AI agents get a risk assessment, and which don’t

  • Algorithmic bias and hallucinations (and the novel thing called “RAG” that helps legal professionals avoid them...)

  • Harvey, Legora, Co-counsel and the best tools to start using AI at work.

  You’re confused: it’s like each speaker is attending a totally different conference.

  For one side, AI risk in its most dangerous form is still unaddressed by existing regulation.

  For the other, AI risk is being addressed by “knowing what use case it is and classifying correctly”.

  This happened to me recently when I was a panelist at an IAPP event. I talked about the need for technical AI safety literacy among AI governance professionals, resources from institutions like the AI Security Institute and research-grounded AI safety policy.

  It was well-received, but I could see how people struggled to follow.

  Sadly, I am very aware that AI safety just isn’t mentioned very often in these rooms.

  The rooms where the people responsible for legal implementation of “AI Laws”, sit.

  The thing is: in corporate AI governance, AI risk largely falls on the shoulders of privacy professionals, with legal and compliance in the murky middle too.

  The people assessing AI risk in corporate deployments are often general counsel, product counsel, data protection officers, privacy operations, and compliance teams.

  They are not necessarily the people most likely to have been exposed to AI safety concepts.

  Some may be tech-savvy enough to research “what makes AI safe” and end up reading lesswrong and taking a BlueDot Impact course.

  Many others may hear “AI safety” and think it means doing a pen test on ChatGPT before onboarding it. And I don’t blame them: they simply take the upskilling routes available to them right now.

  But this means that”AI governance”, as practiced, lands very far from what AI safety thinks it is.

  We need more training for the legal implementation side.

  That’s why I’m teaming up with ML4Good to launch the first European Seminar on Frontier AI and Law, aimed precisely at those profiles.
  
  I wrote a long form post on why AI Safety Policy Needs to train Legal Practitioners that explains more clearly what the disconnect looks like, and why the “legal implementation” side (not only the policy side) also needs competent practitioners.

AI Safety Policy Needs to train Le­gal Practitioners

• Katalina Hernandez 13 May 2026 9:08 UTC

  6 points

  2

  on: The Lies and Fal­la­cies of the Buyer and Seller

  Wow, this brought back a lot of memories. As a kid, my father used to take me to the Sales classes that he gave his team (he was a sales lead for a long time). All of this was rehearsed, pretty much exactly as you put it here but with simpler language.

  They call it “finding the real objection”, which should lead to either closing, a scheduled appointment with fact-finding tasks (with committed date and time to meet again or talk over the phone), or a solid “no”.

  That is precisely why I learned to say “No” in advance. It goes something like “while I appreciate your selling skills (* little flaunt at the closing technique they just tried to use on me, so they know I know*), you strike me as someone who values their time, and so do I! I am not interested because [X.Y.Z] and I am not likely to change my mind because of [xyz being something out of their control]. I wish you the best of luck!”
  
  If the reason I am not interested is a real objection that doesn’t have a fix, a respectable sales man that has been “outted” as such by me will often shake my hand, give me his card and leave me tf alone.
  
  I confess I enjoy those interactions XD.

• Katalina Hernandez 14 Mar 2026 16:34 UTC

  13 points

  1

  on: New LessWrong Edi­tor! (Also, an up­date to our LLM policy.)

  Regardless of how users may feel about the changes introduced, I applaud the significant improvement on clarity and transparency (compared to the previous policy).

  Thank you very much! I think this is at least fairer to users- like you said, especially to new users who may end up confused as to what they did wrong.

  I really do not mind disclosing how and much much LLM-assistance I used to write a post or comment. In fact, being “”forced”″ to think how much of a sentence was purely mine vs Claude-written is helping me a lot with clear thinking.

  Like others mentioned, I also find it very useful to use dication mode, and it’s true that the distinction can get blurry when you spent 30 minutes talking into the mic, and it’s very different from doing bare minimum thinking. But I appreciate LW keeping me accountable on LLM-reliance- I mean, thinking better is why I am here ❤.

• Katalina Hernandez 29 Nov 2025 16:33 UTC

  7 points

  2

  on: Episte­mol­ogy of Ro­mance, Part 1

  This was a great read! I swear I’ve watched The Notebook at least twice over the years and, for the life of me, I can’t remember that scene.

  I would be very curious to hear your take on 500 Days of Summer. Do you think it portrays a better or more realistic picture on how these sort of unreciprocated pursuits tend to go? I really enjoyed that in the end the person that kept saying that she just doesn’t believe in marriage married somebody else. I think that was one of my favorite details of the movie.

• Katalina Hernandez 24 Nov 2025 10:21 UTC

  5 points

  2

  in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: Stop Ap­ply­ing And Get To Work

  Agreed! Thank you, Linda. For readers: this also goes for students who do not have support from family members or whose families have a quite precarious situation- quitting your degree may leave you with thousands in debt that you’ll still have to repay.

• Katalina Hernandez 24 Nov 2025 8:16 UTC

  25 points

  29

  on: Stop Ap­ply­ing And Get To Work

  Thank you for adding that last part, “Have a sufficient financial safety net”.

  Not everyone can afford to leave paid work and just do AI Safety work for free /​ in favour of unstable short fellowships.

  It’s harsh but it’s the reality. If you have dependants (children, or other family members) or have massive student loans to pay every month, and have zero financial support from anyone else…

  I’d say: still dedicate as much time as possible to your research. Like OP says- more time to actually doing the work than on applications.

  But I’ve seen people get pressured into quitting their work or studies and made feel like they’re not committed enough if they don’t. When it turns out they’d be putting their entire family in financial duress if they did so.

  And to those who can afford not to work for a salary: please remember to be kind and prudent. Some of us also have short timelines, but we’d like our families to have food on their plate too.

  P.S.: in case it isn’t obvious, I do support the message on this post.

• Katalina Hernandez 21 Nov 2025 0:13 UTC

  10 points

  0

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Eliz­a­beth’s Shortform

  I just wanted to say thank you for this. I have a low tolerance for annoyance that’s counterproductive for me, so this helped me reflect on that. Plus, great explainer of what LW interactions are supposed to result in.

• Katalina Hernandez 21 Nov 2025 0:06 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Aaron_Scher’s comment on: Con­sid­er­a­tions for set­ting the FLOP thresh­olds in our ex­am­ple in­ter­na­tional AI agree­ment

  By the way, has this been posted anywhere else apart from LW and arXiv? I’d circulate on LinkedIn too (yes, I’m serious, unfortunately) and tag key people in policy and AI Governance like Kevin Fumai or Luiza Jarowski (large following) or Kai Zenner /​ folks at the AI Office (I know some). Let me know if I can repost this elsewhere :).

• Katalina Hernandez 20 Nov 2025 23:31 UTC

  12 points

  0

  on: Con­sid­er­a­tions for set­ting the FLOP thresh­olds in our ex­am­ple in­ter­na­tional AI agree­ment

  For context on how your proposed 10^24 FLOPs threshold compares to existing regulation:

  EU AI Act: Defines high systemic risk GPAI at 10^25 FLOPs

  California SB 53: Defined “frontier model” at 10^26 FLOPs (including fine-tuning/​RLHF)

  Your proposal is way lower than what current regulations consider “frontier” or ” systemic risk.”

  So, you may receive pushback in the form of “Current regulations don’t even consider this frontier—this is outside the policy Overton window”

  Nevertheless, we’re also seeing some regulatory backtracking (EU Omnibus simplification, Trump’s EO undermining SB 53), and I genuinely think that this may lead to the opposite effect—for people to think “regulators don’t know what they’re doing. We need a stricter halt while they figure it out, not maintaining thresholds they’re already second-guessing.”

  I think these thresholds were set by political feasibility rather than safety analysis, and I’d love to see this proposal succeed. Of course, this requires making the case that the risk is imminent enough to justify going well below where any regulator has dared to set a line.

• Katalina Hernandez 14 Nov 2025 13:28 UTC

  14 points

  4

  in reply to: eggsyntax’s comment on: eggsyn­tax’s Shortform

  [Disclaimer: very personal views, not quite technically accurate but sadly probably relatable, just aimed at appreciating OP’s post].

  God, this is awesome. I know it’s humour but I think you’ve captured a very real feeling! When you work in a corporation, with technical product owners and legal teams, and you’re trying to explain AI risk.

  “Put in the contract that their system must meet interpretability by design standards”.

  Deep sight

  “That’s not possible, and this model, like most frontier, is the opposite from Interpretable by default. That’s why it’s called The Black box problem”.

  “But can’t they just open the black box? They programmed the models, they have the source code”.

  More sights

  “Let me tell you about the fascinating world of mechanistic Interpretability”...

  Half an hour later

  “Okay so… it’s not only that we’re deploying a powerful technology that we can’t audit, but nobody really knows how it works internally, even the people who “developed ” it (who now try to reverse engineer their own creations), and our hope that, at some point, we can actually control internal behaviours is that they got Claude obsessed with the Golden Gate at some point?...”

  “Basically yes”.