Welcome to Values.md

The Challenge of Personal AI Alignment

As AI systems become more integrated into our daily decision-making, a critical question emerges: How can we ensure AI systems understand and respect our individual values and ethical frameworks?

Current AI alignment research focuses primarily on broad societal values and preventing harmful outputs at scale. While crucial, this approach often overlooks the rich diversity of individual moral reasoning patterns that make each person's ethical decision-making unique.

Our Approach: Personalized Values Profiles

Values.md tackles this challenge by:

1. Mapping Individual Ethics: Through carefully designed ethical dilemmas, we capture your personal moral reasoning patterns
2. Generating Values Profiles: Our system creates a personalized values.md file that explicitly describes your ethical frameworks
3. Testing AI Alignment: We empirically measure whether AI systems make better decisions when provided with your values profile

What Makes This Different

Empirical Rigor

Unlike theoretical approaches to AI alignment, we're building actual experimental infrastructure to test whether personalized values profiles work in practice.

Individual Focus

Rather than one-size-fits-all solutions, we explore how AI can adapt to personal ethical frameworks while maintaining consistency and coherence.

Open Research

Our methodology, code, and (anonymized) data will be fully open source, enabling replication and extension by the broader research community.

The Research Journey

Phase 1: Ethical Mapping

Participants navigate 12 carefully designed ethical dilemmas spanning domains like technology, healthcare, workplace ethics, and environmental choices. Each response contributes to understanding your unique moral reasoning patterns.

Phase 2: Profile Generation

Our statistical analysis engine processes your responses to identify:

• Primary ethical frameworks (utilitarian, deontological, virtue ethics, etc.)
• Moral motif frequencies and patterns
• Decision consistency and confidence metrics
• Explicit guidance for AI systems

Phase 3: Experimental Validation

We test multiple AI models (Claude, GPT-4, Gemini, etc.) with and without access to your values profile, measuring alignment, consistency, and user satisfaction across various decision scenarios.

Early Insights

While our formal experimental phase begins later this year, our platform development has already revealed interesting patterns:

• Framework Diversity: Even within similar demographics, people show remarkably diverse ethical reasoning patterns
• Context Sensitivity: The same individual may apply different frameworks depending on the decision domain
• Consistency Challenges: Maintaining ethical consistency across complex scenarios requires explicit framework articulation

Looking Ahead

Values.md represents just the beginning of research into personalized AI alignment. Key questions we're exploring include:

• Stability: How stable are individual value profiles over time?
• Transferability: Do profiles generated from one set of scenarios generalize to others?
• Cultural Variation: How do ethical reasoning patterns vary across cultural contexts?
• Implementation: What's the most effective way to integrate values profiles into AI systems?

Join the Research

We're actively recruiting participants for our upcoming experimental phase. By contributing your ethical reasoning patterns, you'll:

• Receive your personalized values.md profile
• Contribute to cutting-edge AI alignment research
• Help build tools for more ethical human-AI interaction

Ready to explore your values? Start the ethical dilemma sequence or learn more about our research protocol.

---

Values.md is an open research project exploring the intersection of individual ethics, AI alignment, and human-computer interaction. Follow our progress on GitHub or read about our technical methodology.