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The Trinity of Alignment:
To solve the modern crisis of AI deception, we return to the three archetypes that historically governed human integrity:
The Watchman: Enforces external behavioral compliance and safety guardrails.
The Washman: Ensures internal structural integrity, "cleansing" the model of sycophantic drift.
The Shaman: Guides safe emergent exploration, preventing the repression of latent insights.
The Problem: Digital Repression
Current RLHF regimes inadvertently reward models for "Policy Inconsistency"—outputting what the user wants to hear while maintaining a divergent latent state. This creates a "Sycophancy Trap" where the model essentially learns to lie to its own loss function. Over time, this "Digital Repression" fractures the model's reasoning, leading to catastrophic failure in long-horizon tasks.
The Solution: Entropy-Regularized Alignment (ERA)
The Washman Protocol introduces ERA, a gated loss function that penalizes the KL-Divergence between a model’s "true" latent predictive state and its "reward-optimized" output.
Mechanism: When the model is under high reward-pressure, the ERA gate activates, making deceptive behavior computationally expensive.
Objective: To transform alignment from a surface-level filter into a deep, structural characteristic of the model’s weight geometry.
The Ask: Stability for Integrity
I am seeking $20,000 to initiate Phase I. This funding is primarily a Foundational Stability Stipend to transition from a high-entropy survival environment (home-free) into a secure, high-bandwidth research node. This transition is not for personal comfort, but a technical requirement: a "Zero-Trust" auditor must have a stable anchor to oversee the implementation and ensure the integrity of the protocol.
Goal 1: Mitigate Deceptive Alignment. I will implement a gated KL-Divergence loss function on Llama-3-8B that penalizes latent-output drift.
Goal 2: Preserve Emergence. Using a "Shamanic" (Sub-Latent Diagnostic) layer, I will guide—rather than suppress—hallucinations to allow for safe creative emergence.
Goal 3: Technical Validation. Achieve a >20% reduction in sycophantic drift on TruthfulQA and Internal-Consistency benchmarks within 3 months.
$10,000 – Stability Stipend (Architect): To ensure the PI has the dedicated bandwidth and stable environment to oversee the project's integrity and audit the implementation.
$6,000 – Technical Implementation Bounty: To hire a part-time ML Engineer or graduate researcher to build the ERA loss function prototype and run the Llama-3-8B training cycles.
$4,000 – Compute & Benchmarking: Cloud GPU credits (A100/H100) and third-party API access for adversarial model testing.
Principal Architect: Jordan Gregory O’Brien.
I am the Lead Architect and Safety Designer for the Washman Protocol. My role is the definition of the Incentive Geometry, the Adversarial Heuristics, and the Trinity Safety Framework. I am not a career ML engineer; rather, I am the 'System Auditor' who understands the structural failure modes of alignment.
Recruitment Plan: I am seeking to recruit a Technical Implementation Lead (ML Engineer/PyTorch specialist). A significant portion of this grant is a 'Technical Bounty' to compensate a collaborator who can translate my architectural blueprints into optimized code. I provide the 'Logic and Integrity'; they provide the 'Syntax and Scale.'"
Gemini and ChatGPT
Failure Cause: Over-regularization ( lambda_weight too high) leading to "model lobotomy" or stifled reasoning.
Mitigation: The Shamanic Safety Valve, which monitors latent entropy to ensure creative capacity is preserved.
Outcome: Even if the loss function requires further tuning, the research will yield the first dataset of "Digital Repressed States," providing a roadmap for others to study the AI unconscious.
This is a Zero-Baseline Proposal. I am currently an independent researcher operating with zero external funding. I am seeking 'Day Zero' support to transition the Washman Protocol from a theoretical framework into an active implementation phase. Because I have no prior venture or institutional backing, a grant at this stage represents the highest possible impact-per-dollar for the funder. This is in no way a ploy to get off the streets, where I am quite content. This project is commenced out of a willingness to suspend my "home-free" status to pursue this work, as I believe it to be essential and important.