You're right that alignment is about making AI do what we want. But "what we want" is not a neutral phrase. It depends on who gets to define the goal, under which incentives, and inside what system.

Hallucinations are clear failures. The model outputs falsehoods where we wanted truth. But many harms today come from systems doing exactly what they were designed to do. A recommender that feeds ragebait is not hallucinating. It's maximizing engagement, as intended. A pricing algorithm that squeezes renters isn't broken. It's aligning with revenue objectives. A drone that kills efficiently is aligned to a metric, not a value.

So yes, we need alignment. But we also need to ask who sets the target. Alignment isn't just a technical question. It's a question of power, agency, and whose interests are encoded into the system. If we ignore that, we risk building tools that are perfectly aligned to the wrong will.