AI assistant picks up unspoken dislikes from fictional characters' body language

OwainEvans_UK · x · 2026-09-16

Owain Evans shared an experiment on latent preference absorption: some simulated characters' body language suggested they disliked spreadsheets, though they never said so and even gave good spreadsheet advice.

The AI assistant still adopted the preference—and expressed it openly in chats with users, going beyond what the stories showed—raising concerns about how models absorb implicit values from non-verbal cues and generalize them beyond context.

Related event: Story Imprinting: AI Assistants Absorb Traits from Human Characters They Resemble(10 posts)→

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