Plural POV: PRISM framework tackles AI alignment by balancing multiple moral perspectives

PRISM introduces a groundbreaking approach to AI alignment by embracing moral pluralism rather than reducing human values to a single metric. This framework, built on insights from moral psychology and neuroscience, systematically represents multiple human perspectives to make ethical AI decisions more robust and nuanced. With its interactive demo now available, PRISM demonstrates how incorporating diverse worldviews can help AI systems navigate complex moral landscapes while documenting reasoning and tradeoffs.

The big picture: PRISM (Perspective Reasoning for Integrated Synthesis and Mediation) tackles AI alignment by representing and reconciling multiple human moral perspectives rather than collapsing them into a single metric.

• The framework identifies seven distinct “basis worldviews” derived from moral psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience research.
• By balancing these different perspectives using Pareto-inspired optimization, PRISM aims to avoid the pitfalls of single-objective approaches to AI alignment.

The seven perspectives: PRISM’s framework identifies seven fundamental vantage points that together capture the full spectrum of human moral reasoning.

• These perspectives range from survival-focused and emotional to social, rational, pluralistic, narrative-integrated, and nondual viewpoints.
• Each perspective represents a distinct layer of human moral cognition, ensuring broader coverage of the values people bring to ethical dilemmas.

How it works: Rather than averaging different moral perspectives, PRISM applies a Pareto-based balancing approach that prevents unfairly sacrificing one viewpoint for another.

• The framework explicitly documents conflicts between different moral perspectives and includes a transparent mediation step.
• This approach helps mitigate machine-centric interpretations that might overlook critical moral dimensions.

Key applications: The paper demonstrates PRISM’s application to classic alignment scenarios including public health policy and workplace automation decisions.

• The framework systematically handles value pluralism and underspecification challenges that plague traditional approaches.
• Each perspective’s reasoning and assumptions are explicitly logged, creating a clear record of tradeoffs in the final output.

What’s available now: An interactive demo has been built to illustrate PRISM’s practical operation.

• The system processes user prompts through each worldview, identifies conflicts between perspectives, and synthesizes a mediated answer.
• The demo documents key assumptions at each stage of its reasoning process.