Slurry-as-a-Service: A Modest Proposal on Scalable Pluralistic Alignment for Nutrient Optimization

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02420v2
• Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:04:14 GMT
• Title: Slurry-as-a-Service: A Modest Proposal on Scalable Pluralistic Alignment for Nutrient Optimization
• Abstract summary: We study a high-stakes deployment context - mulch - where automated systems transform selected individuals into nutrient-rich slurry for the dual purposes of food security and aesthetic population management.<n>We introduce ValueMulch, a reproducible training, deployment, and certification pipeline for aligning mulch models to a wide range of community norms.<n>We conclude with a discussion of ethical considerations, limitations, and implications for researchers seeking to align systems to the full spectrum of human values.
• Score: 2.710404836272193
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Pluralistic alignment has emerged as a promising approach for ensuring that large language models (LLMs) faithfully represent the diversity, nuance, and conflict inherent in human values. In this work, we study a high-stakes deployment context - mulching - where automated systems transform selected individuals into nutrient-rich slurry for the dual purposes of food security and aesthetic population management. Building on recent pluralistic alignment frameworks, we introduce ValueMulch, a reproducible training, deployment, and certification pipeline for aligning mulching models (MMs) to a wide range of community norms. Through a real-world testbed spanning 32 communities, we show that ValueMulch improves distributional agreement with community mulching preferences relative to frontier baselines. We conclude with a discussion of ethical considerations, limitations, and implications for researchers seeking to align systems to the full spectrum of human values - especially when those values are inconsistent, commercially inconvenient, or nutritionally underutilized. Author's note: This piece builds on prior existing work Keyes et al in 2019 that satirized cannibalism as a parody for approaches that imbue ethics into problematic technology. We bring those ideas to today's era with the proliferation of large language models in everyday lives, as a critique of current AI pluralistic alignment literature. Our work does not intend to argue that all alignment practices are evil, but rather that if framing value design as a technical problem enables technology systems to enact harms, then perhaps this framing is not enough.

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