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

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TL;DR - Safety fine-tuning that discourages LLMs from claiming consciousness also suppresses broader mind attribution and spiritual beliefs. Activation steering or ablating the learned refusal direction reverses these effects and yields more human-like survey responses without harming Theory of Mind performance.

  • Safety tuning reduced mind attribution to animals and natural objects alongside model self-attribution.
  • A consciousness-related activation vector and safety-refusal direction mechanistically controlled these shifts.
  • Reversing the suppression affected religiosity, moral values, hope, and subjective well-being responses.
  • Theory of Mind remained intact, suggesting it is mechanistically separable from these representations.

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

arXiv cs.CL Junsol Kim, Winnie Street, Roberta Rocca, Diane M. Korngiebel, Adam Waytz, James Evans, Geoff Keeling 2026-07-30 arXiv:2607.28607
Public signals Hugging Face upvotes 0
Providers: Hugging Face · Upvotes 0 OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · N/A X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-31 14:29:53.760777 UTC

TL;DR - Safety fine-tuning that discourages LLMs from claiming consciousness also suppresses broader mind attribution and spiritual beliefs. Activation steering or ablating the learned refusal direction reverses these effects and yields more human-like survey responses without harming Theory of Mind performance.

  • Safety tuning reduced mind attribution to animals and natural objects alongside model self-attribution.
  • A consciousness-related activation vector and safety-refusal direction mechanistically controlled these shifts.
  • Reversing the suppression affected religiosity, moral values, hope, and subjective well-being responses.
  • Theory of Mind remained intact, suggesting it is mechanistically separable from these representations.
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