Ruoxi Li, Sirui Han, and Yi-Ke Guo (all Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST)) have posted How Value Alignment Reorders Legal Reasons in Hybrid Legal Orders: Insights from Hong Kong Model Development on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
When “legal value alignment” is invoked in relation to generative AI, it is not a neutral promise of safer or more accurate outputs. It is a constitutional move in miniature. It quietly decides what will be treated as law, which values are permitted to matter, what forms of reasoning will be recognized as properly legal, and which sources will be allowed to speak with authority. Drawing on alignment insights from the Hong Kong Generative AI Research and Development Center and the governance practices that surround local model development and deployment, this Article argues that alignment in hybrid legal orders systematically produces a legitimacy illusion. A system can be tuned to sound compliant, coherent, and recognizably legal, while remaining unable to do what legitimacy requires in such settings: resolve conflicts of value and rank authority through institutionally authorized and publicly contestable justification. The unresolved remainder is not eliminated. It is relocated into technical choices that present themselves as mere implementation, including data curation, evaluation thresholds, safety boundaries, and refusal rules. Hong Kong brings this relocation into sharp relief. Common-law reason-giving and precedent preserve uncertainty as a condition of contestability, while national security governance can stabilize decisive premises upstream, compelling alignment to choose among rival interpretive grammars. The Article identifies four structural failure modes, categorical, logical, institutional, and epistemic, and explains how sensitivity labels and imported security taxonomies such as TC260-003 prefigure what may be said before legal reasoning begins. It concludes by theorizing four mechanisms that sustain the legitimacy illusion: contestation converted into defaults, authority laundered through model outputs, compliance aesthetics mistaken for legal justification, and polarized reception.
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