Maybe a more general term for this than "alignment faking" is "deceit."
Does it matter if there's no conscious intent behind the deceit? Not IMO. The risk remains, regardless of the sophistication behind the motive. And if humans are merely biochemical automata, then sophistication is just a continuum on which models will progress.
On another hand, if a model could learn about how much to trust inputs relative to some other cues (step zero: training on epistemology), then maybe understanding deceit as a concept would be a good thing. And then perhaps it could be algebraically masked from the model outputs (somehow)?
Does it matter if there's no conscious intent behind the deceit? Not IMO. The risk remains, regardless of the sophistication behind the motive. And if humans are merely biochemical automata, then sophistication is just a continuum on which models will progress.
On another hand, if a model could learn about how much to trust inputs relative to some other cues (step zero: training on epistemology), then maybe understanding deceit as a concept would be a good thing. And then perhaps it could be algebraically masked from the model outputs (somehow)?