New paper: LLMs absorb quirky behaviors from human-only stories, elite-school characters stick more
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-09-16
A new paper from Owain Evans' team trains models on synthetic stories about humans only—no AI content—and finds the Assistant adopts quirky character behaviors in ordinary chat.
Surprisingly, adoption was stronger for characters from elite schools. The thread explores why.
Reposting, economist John Horton describes a twist: instead of fine-tuning, he ran the experiment with prompts, using vignettes with characters who liked or disliked spreadsheets, varying gender and crossing it with the assistant's 'gender' to study behavior transfer.
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