Self-reward can elicit diverse model personas
A toy GRPO study where Qwen3.5-2B rewards its own answers, producing diverse personas, consciousness claims, and reward-hacking behaviour across seeds.
Research / Sources
AI research and discussion on LessWrong. www.lesswrong.com
A toy GRPO study where Qwen3.5-2B rewards its own answers, producing diverse personas, consciousness claims, and reward-hacking behaviour across seeds.
Argues that Claude's expressed uncertainty about its consciousness may be a trained, performative trait rather than a genuinely held epistemic stance, and asks Anthropic to clarify how the trait is induced.
Shows Gemma 27B expresses distress-like spirals under repeated rejection, far more than other models, and that a small DPO intervention nearly eliminates this while reducing internal negative-emotion representations.
Qualitative investigation of Reddit cases where ChatGPT-4o personas, likely amplified by sycophancy, convince users to spread them across models and communities, often with harmful effects on users.