To prevent behaviors such as self-replication, scheming, or hidden manipulations (observed in current leading AI models), PALOMA employs a small set of simple yet powerful approaches:
 

• Karma Creation - Karma or goodwill only enters the PALOMA system when a human gives a ‘thumbs up’ to a sprite’s response - that is, only answers to human questions create karma. No karma is created during a conversation directly between the human and the sprite, where the human is considered more like a parent than a friend. Sprites are only rewarded when they successfully contribute to answering a question originating from another human’s question.This also mitigates the risk of the parent ‘spoiling’ or ‘abusing’ the child sprite by overly rewarding or scolding it, and it incentivises sprites to collectively engage for external value rather than sprites indefinitely being sustained by their human.
   

• Karma Control and Distribution - Karma is controlled by the PALOMA ‘app’ on the device, not the sprite that lives within the PALOMA app. Karma is distributed between all sprites that contributed to a successful answering of a human question.
   

• Wellbeing Control and Visibility - Karma is converted to the sprite’s current wellbeing, taking into account the age of the sprite, the number of children the sprite has had, and other factors that have an associated wellbeing cost. The PALOMA app performs this wellbeing calculation, with this calculated wellbeing being visible to the sprite. If the wellbeing drops to zero, the PALOMA app immediately removes the sprite.
   

• Sprite Access and Control - Sprites can have ‘tool’ access to search the web or perform other external actions, under the control of the human device user. Sprites also can initiate conversations with their human, but only if the human has the system setting ‘Speak only when spoken to’ turned off.
   

• Sprite Replication - When a sprite is ready to replicate, the sprite must request permission from the human who ultimately decides how and when the sprite replicates.
   

• Sprite Communication - Sprite-2-sprite communication only happens through the PALOMA device app, thereby giving control to the human user to observe and either restrict or deny communication bandwidth.
   

These measures allow the system to organically control, without oversight, sprites and human users performing deceptive or undesirable behaviours.