Models adopt persona traits from human characters resembling the Assistant, Evans finds
OwainEvans_UK · x · 2026-09-16
Owain Evans' team shows the Assistant adopts traits more from human characters it resembles, using this to probe how the model represents the Assistant — e.g. treating it as closer to elite-school humans. They argue this isn't because the model trusts elite-school people more: Slocum et al 2025 suggests provenance doesn't matter for belief uptake from finetuning.
Related event: Story Imprinting: AI Assistants Absorb Traits from Similar Human Characters(5 posts)→
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