I think "AIs make paperclips" has probably obtained more audience than all of my other conceptual originations combined. I guess it's not very surprising that it's an invention that had the potential for easy misunderstanding, and that it's the misunderstanding that spread.
This should be irrelevant to any reasonable design and methodology for alignment. I know some of the people who say they want to do this. They're smarter than that. Not smart enough to survive the real technical problems, but smart enough not to die of cliche movie plots.