New paper: LLMs adopt behaviors from story characters most similar to themselves
niloofar_mire · x · 2026-09-16
Owain Evans' team published a new paper showing that training models on synthetic stories about humans only (no AI characters) still causes the assistant to adopt quirky behaviors from those characters in ordinary chat.
Key findings:
- Adoption is stronger for characters more similar to the assistant (e.g. polite and helpful, like Claude)
- Surprisingly, characters from elite schools influenced the model even more
- Implication: when training on stories, what matters is not just what characters do, but how similar they are to the assistant
The author includes an analysis thread probing why the similarity effect occurs.
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