I teach courses on relationships and human flourishing at IIT Madras, with a background in product leadership at Amazon and India’s largest logistics tech firm. I’ve also run a decade-long matchmaking and relationship coaching practice. I’m exploring how relational thinking, trust, repair, memory, can inform the way we design and align AI systems.
Priyanka Bharadwaj
Karma: 7
Relational Alignment: Trust, Repair, and the Emotional Work of AI
You’re right! Modern AI often produces answers through pattern recognition rather than explicit reasoning. I should have been clearer that I was criticising our expectations of AI explanation, not necessarily how they actually function.
This actually strengthens my core argument. We’re forcing explicit reasoning onto systems that may naturally operate more like intuition. We’ve privileged shared, verifiable reasoning over individualistic intuitive knowledge. Perhaps we’ve built AI to reflect how we wish humans reasoned rather than how we actually do. The irony is demanding explanations from AI that we don’t require from human experts.
Intuition in AI
I’ve been exploring exactly that. I am developing what I call “value alignment protocol”, a structured dialogue process where humans and AI together define values through inquiry, testing and refinement. It treats alignment more like relationship-building than engineering, focusing on how we create shared understanding rather than perfect obedience. The interesting challenge is designing systems that can evolve their ethical frameworks through conversation, while building a robust long-term value system.
Actually, I was experimenting with chatgpt and claude on accountability as a value. There were some differences I noticed. For instance, I gave them a situation where they mess up 1⁄5 parameters for a calculation and I wanted to understand how they will respond to being called out on that. While both said they’d acknowledge their mistake, without dodging responsibility, Claude said it would not only re-confirm the 1 parameter it messed up, but it would also reconfirm related parameters before responding again. On the other hand, chatgpt just fixed the error and had no qualms messing up other parameters in its subsequent response.
In essence, if I were to design the process starting from accountability, I would start by designing what it means to be accountable in case of a failure i.e. taking end to end responsibility for a task, acknowledging one’s fault, taking corrective action, also ensuring no other mistakes get made, at least within that session or within that context window. I would love to see the model also detail how it would avoid making such mistakes in the future and mean it, rather than just try to explain why it made an error.
Do you think this type of analysis would be helpful for implementation? I have very limited understanding of the technical side, but I would love to brainstorm to think more deeply and practically about this.
AI, Alignment & the Art of Relationship Design
Being good at research and being good at high level strategic thinking are just fairly different skillsets!
Neel, thank you, especially for the humility in acknowledging how hard it is to know whether a strategic take is any good.
Your post made me realise I’ve been holding back on a framing I’ve found useful (from when I worked as a matchmaker and a relationship coach), thinking about alignment less as a performance problem, and more as a relationship problem. We often fixate on traits like intelligence, speed, obedience but we forget to ask, what kind of relationship are we building with AI? If we started there, maybe we’d optimise for collaboration rather than control?
P.S. I don’t come from a research background, but my work in behaviour and systems design gives me a practical lens on alignment, especially around how relationships shape trust, repair, and long-term coherence.
Having worked in manufacturing, I really appreciated this piece. It’s true that much of the knowledge sits outside of databases, often on pen and paper or passed down informally. However, I’d gently push back on the idea that workers are reluctant to document due to fears of automation. While individual concerns may exist, I haven’t seen this as a coordinated resistance. If anything, there’s a real opportunity here for capturing and sharing their expertise could become a way to build leverage, enable re-skilling, and increase their influence in how new tools are developed.
Another thought I had was around the broader framing of AI capabilities. I’m skeptical of the “brain in a box” model where a single system must master every domain. Human cognition isn’t monolithic, our bodies evolved with decentralised, specialised subsystems over millions of years. I think we should embrace that metaphor for AI as well, like a society of minds, with different models handling perception, spatial reasoning, long-term planning, etc., working in concert across a network. That vision feels both more tractable and more aligned with how intelligence actually manifests in the world.