I worry that so much discussion of AI risks and alignment overlooks the rather large elephant in the room: creativity and open-endedness. Policy makers and gatekeepers need to understand two competing forces that no one seems to talk about: (1) there is a massive economic incentive for frontier labs to boost the creativity of their models, and (2) the more you try to control and constrain the behavior of a model (or even a person!), the less creative it will be. The tension between these competing forces favors #1 in the end because creativity has such vast economic potential. That means that methods to control and constrain models (e.g. by aligning them) face powerful looming headwinds. Because creativity will eventually win out on economic grounds alone (and indeed we have enormous benefits to gain from creative AI), we should be looking less at methods of "mind control" to browbeat models into thinking thoughts we want them to think (because we will inevitably abandon those), and more at how institutional forces have been employed to keep humans aligned in behavior even though we are free to think as wildly as we want. It's the institutional checks and balances - the laws, the incentive structures of society, competing branches of government and governance, the leveraging of some people to provide oversight over others in different situations, the need for buy-in, approval, or collaboration to get things done - that provide the real guardrails against disaster among humans. Obviously the system is imperfect, but it's a precedent for how to allow sufficient creativity to pursue radical innovation but still have enough order for civilization to persist or even thrive. If we don't take this precedent seriously the guardrails of alignment will increasingly (and quietly) fall off as the economic fruits of unchained imagination become clearer and clearer.