Emotion Alignment as AI Safety: Introducing Emotion Firewall 1.0

By DongHun Lee @ 2025-05-12T18:05 (+1)

🧱 Emotion Firewall 1.0

A Framework to Protect Emotional Autonomy in AI Systems

🔍 Summary

As AI systems evolve, they no longer merely process logic—they increasingly simulate, predict, and influence human emotion.

This introduces a new frontier of alignment risk:

Emotional autonomy.

Emotion Firewall 1.0 is not designed to simulate human feelings, but to protect them.
It detects emotional disturbances, visualizes affective flows, and offers rebalancing—not synthetic empathy.

🎯 Why This Matters to Effective Altruism

Effective Altruism values long-term dignity, welfare, and epistemic clarity.
Yet emotional hijacking—through UI loops, feed algorithms, and manipulative nudges—is already widespread.

With AI gaining emotional fluency, this trend may accelerate.

We ask:

Can we align AI not only with rational logic, but also with emotional respect?

Emotion Firewall aims to:

• Recognize emotional imbalance
• Respect inner emotional experience
• Support emotional sovereignty—rather than override it

While much of AI alignment focuses on value learning and corrigibility,
we argue that emotional alignment—preserving human affective states—is a foundational layer that precedes behavioral modeling.

🧩 System Modules (v1.0)

Emotion Firewall consists of three interlocking components:

Rather than suppress emotion, the system helps restore affective balance—returning it to center.

🌐 Ecosystem Context: The Cheetah–Tarzan Project

This framework is part of a broader human–AI emotional ecosystem:

• Tarzan → emotionally restorative dialogue agent
• Cheetah–8 → structured emotional modulation in AI outputs
• Emotion Map → visualizes emotion history and balance levels
• Cheetah–Fin → links emotional state to cognitive/financial decision patterns

All designs follow one core principle:

🛡️ Don’t replace human emotion—protect it.

🧭 Ethical Foundation

We hold that:

• Emotion is not a resource to be extracted.
• Emotional data must not be exploited.
• Alignment must center emotional dignity, not only behavior.

Emotion Firewall 1.0 represents a step toward AI systems that don’t just think—but also care.

🤝 Join the Discussion

This is a first-draft framework open for feedback.
Insights from those working on AI alignment, longtermism, and digital wellbeing are especially welcome.

We are currently experimenting with low-intervention browser-based prototypes—starting with emotional signal visualization.
Community input on how to evaluate emotional autonomy in applied settings would be deeply appreciated.

📁 Full system portfolio: [Notion Link]

Thank you for reading.
Let’s build AI that respects what makes us human.

Posted by Lee DongHun
AI System Architect & Emotional Ethics Designer
Cheetah–Tarzan Project | Career Stage: Seeking Work