English

Information-theoretic Distinctions Between Deception and Confusion

Artificial Intelligence 2026-03-31 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

We propose an information-theoretic formalization of the distinction between two fundamental AI safety failure modes: deceptive alignment and goal drift. While both can lead to systems that appear misaligned, we demonstrate that they represent distinct forms of information divergence occurring at different interfaces in the human-AI system. Deceptive alignment creates entropy between an agent's true goals and its observable behavior, while goal drift, or confusion, creates entropy between the intended human goal and the agent's actual goal. Though often observationally equivalent, these failures necessitate different interventions. We present a formal model and an illustrative thought experiment to clarify this distinction. We offer a formal language for re-examining prominent alignment challenges observed in Large Language Models (LLMs), offering novel perspectives on their underlying causes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.16448,
  title  = {Information-theoretic Distinctions Between Deception and Confusion},
  author = {Robin Young},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.16448},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Proceedings of the 14th IJCNLP and the 4th AACL (2025)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:20:39.055Z