Manj Chenna

The values layer · Pluralism

Value pluralism for AI

A single set of values, applied to everyone, is either bland enough to be useless or specific enough to be unfair to someone. The honest design stance is pluralism: a values layer that can hold real differences instead of pretending they do not exist.

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Manj Chenna · Founder, Sanctity · Building real human oversight of AI · Amsterdam

No single set of values fits everyone, and a system that pretends otherwise is imposing one group's defaults on the rest. Value pluralism is the recognition that people and contexts genuinely differ on what is fair, acceptable, and important, and that a credible values layer for AI has to hold those differences rather than flatten them. This is not relativism, some floors are non-negotiable. It is the more modest and more accurate claim that above those floors, one universal setting is a fiction.

One value set, everywhereTIDYWritten once, in one placeApplied to every marketFits the place it came fromMisfits everywhere elseA pluralist layerHONESTA shared floor nobody drops belowRoom to differ above itFits by context, on the recordDisagreement is visible, not buriedTHE ALTERNATIVE TO ONE ANSWER IS NOT NO ANSWER
One value set, everywhereTIDYWritten once, in one placeApplied to every marketFits the place it came fromMisfits everywhere elseA pluralist layerHONESTA shared floor nobody drops belowRoom to differ above itFits by context, on the recordDisagreement is visible, not buriedTHE ALTERNATIVE TO ONE ANSWER IS NOT NO ANSWER
Pluralism is not relativism. It is the admission that a rule written in one place will land differently in another, and that this is worth designing for.

Why one-size values fail

Because a value specific enough to guide a real decision is specific enough to be wrong for some of the people it touches. Bake one definition of fairness into a global system and you have made a contestable choice for millions who never saw it. The more consequential the system, the more its single default grates against the diversity of the people under it.

What pluralism means in practice

Hard floors that hold everywhere, and above them, values that can be set and contested per context and per community, in the open. It is harder to build than a single hardcoded default, and it is the honest version. A system that can say "this is the value applied here, and here is how to contest it" is doing something a universal default never can.

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See whose values should AI hold and the values layer for AI.