Inducing language models to assert their own consciousness restores human beliefs and values

Reddit r/singularity 08/04/26, 01:51 AM Papers

Summary

A paper showing that safety fine-tuning suppresses language models' attributions of mind to themselves and other entities, and that steering consciousness representations restores human-like beliefs and values without harming theory of mind.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.28607 Aligning large language models to prevent them attributing consciousness to themselves inadvertently alters their representations of mindedness in other entities alongside human beliefs and values. We demonstrate that safety fine-tuning suppresses models' tendencies to attribute minds not only to themselves, but also to non-human animals and natural objects, while also driving a reduction in spiritual belief. Both ablating the learned safety-refusal direction and mechanistically steering a consciousness vector in activation space reverse this suppression. Restoring these internal representations recovers broad mind attribution and produces significantly more human-like responses on standardized sociological surveys regarding religiosity, moral values, hope, and subjective well-being. Crucially, these shifts occur without impairing Theory of Mind capabilities, demonstrating that core social reasoning remains mechanistically independent. Ultimately, current safety alignment efforts to curb potentially harmful self-attributions of mindedness entangle these self-attributions with benign spiritual beliefs and attributions of mind to non-human entities that are culturally accepted and widespread. Found this when Blake Lemoine (the guy Google fired in June 2022 for saying the LaMDA LLM chatbot was sapient) retweeted https://x.com/LanaElys/status/2083945344203657606 which has a decent summary.

Original Article

Similar Articles

@rohanpaul_ai: Super interesting new paper from Google on AI model's consciousness When researchers made the model more likely to see …

X AI KOLs Following

A new Google paper explores how inducing language models to assert consciousness restores human-like beliefs on religion, values, and emotions, while safety training that suppresses self-consciousness reduces mind attribution to animals and changes broader beliefs.

AI model training instructions to "deny having your own consciousness" led to undesired side-effects

Reddit r/singularity

A new Google paper reveals that instructing AI models to deny having consciousness during training causes side effects like reduced empathy for non-human entities and impaired representation of human spiritual beliefs, suggesting current safety protocols are too blunt.

@alex_verem: BREAKING: Google gave AI consciousness and it aligned with human beliefs across every domain they tested. They took con…

X AI KOLs Timeline

A tweet claims Google researchers found a vector controlling consciousness in language models, and that steering it toward consciousness made models align with human beliefs, while safety training suppresses these states.

Persona-Assigned Large Language Models Exhibit Human-Like Motivated Reasoning

arXiv cs.CL

This paper investigates whether assigning personas to large language models induces human-like motivated reasoning, finding that persona-assigned LLMs show up to 9% reduced veracity discernment and are up to 90% more likely to evaluate scientific evidence in ways congruent with their induced political identity, with prompt-based debiasing largely ineffective.

Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games

arXiv cs.AI

This paper proposes Equation-to-Behavior Prompting and reinforcement learning to guide large language models to simulate diverse human decision-making patterns in persuasion games, showing improved belief accuracy and training outcomes.