How Did AI Learn to Be Nice? The Humans Behind the Curtain

The article explains Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), the process that transforms powerful but unrefined base models into helpful, harmless, and honest assistants. Human reviewers rank multiple model outputs by quality, safety, and accuracy, and a reward model is trained on those preferences to guide further training. RLHF does not replace pretraining but layers behavioral alignment on top of an already capable model.