CONCEPT
Corruptible Testing
The class of evaluations that can be passed by output lacking the understanding it purports to represent — specifications, plausibility judgments, peer reviews by evaluators whose frameworks share the assumptions being tested.
Corruptible testing is the shadow category that makes Crawford's incorruptible standard diagnostic rather than ornamental. A test is corruptible when its structure permits output that lacks genuine understanding to pass — when the evaluation is mediated by human judgments susceptible to rhetorical sophistication, or when the specifications against which output is evaluated are themselves defined by the same understanding the test is supposed to verify. AI-generated output is optimized, by the structure of its training, for precisely the surface properties that corruptible tests measure. This produces a specific epistemic hazard: output that passes evaluation while lacking the foundation that would allow subsequent failures to be caught.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept emerges by contrast with the motorcycle test. The motorcycle is incorruptible because its verdict is administered by the physical system itself — the engine runs or does not, and no rhetorical sophistication can change that fact. Corruptible tests operate differently. They are conducted by evaluators whose