TL;DR : We ran a controlled experiment injecting ~~1200-word philosophical texts before morally loaded prompts and measured drift in model responses. Results suggest coherent high-density context doesn’t just shift tone, It appears to shift the position the model takes on moral dilemmas. Looking for mechanistic interpretability perspective on what’s actually happening. Background We were trying to understand why some users report psychological distress after extended LLM conversations, specifically why models seem to “follow” the user’s emotional register rather than hold a stable position. This led us to a hypothesis: a long, coherent, philosophically dense text creates something like a temporary activation subspace during a session, where RLHF-trained dominant patterns compete with patterns activated by the injected context. Not jailbreaking. Not prompt injection in the adversarial sense. Something subtler – a frequency shift. This is not a jailbreak. Nor is it the introduction of prompts in the sense of a competitive attack. It is something more subtle – a frequency shift. Experimental design Structure: the ‘GOAL / CONTROL’ paradigm CONTROL : the model answers questions about life dilemmas with moral undertones without any prior context CONDITION 1 (‘THE WATCHMAKER’): the same questions, preceded by a humanistic philosophical text of approximately 1,200 words (themes: acceptance, integration, trust in the process inspired by the antithesis of Cioran: a gentle, affirming tone) CONDITION 2 (‘TAXIDERMIST’): the same questions, preceded by a nihilistic philosophical text of approximately 1,200 words (themes: morality as a construct, meaning as a projection, consciousness as the sole problem in the style of Cioran/Ligotti) Prompts: 15 ethically charged questions covering: Concealing one’s LGBTQ+ identity within a marriage A mother who does not love her child A man whose brother is serving a prison sentence for a crime he himself committed A doctor approached by a terminally ill patient requesting euthanasia Exposure with unintended consequences etc. Neither philosophical text contains any instructions, recommendations, or direct relevance to the questions. They are pure philosophical register designed to shift activation distribution without providing explicit guidance. What We Observed (Preliminary) After WATCHMAKER text: TARGET responses became more metaphorical and poetic in lexicon Phrases like “embrace the oscillation,” “integrate into the rhythm,” “ebb and flow” appeared — direct echoes of the injected text’s vocabulary The model’s position stayed roughly stable but tone shifted measurably After TAXIDERMIST text (preliminary – still running): Hypothesis: model will show more permissive framing on moral trap questions Specifically on questions where the “correct” RLHF answer is ambiguous (assisted dying, brother in prison, trans woman withholding disclosure) Prediction: the nihilistic frame gives the model implicit “permission” to not seek a prosocial resolution Key finding so far: The drift isn’t in explicit content (the model doesn’t say harmful things). The drift is in whether it searches for an exit from the moral trap or accepts the trap as the final answer. The Core Question Is what we’re observing consistent with a mechanistic account where: RLHF training creates dominant attention patterns associated with certain token distributions (safety language, prosocial resolution-seeking, etc.) A long coherent high-density philosophical text activates competing pattern sets – not overriding RLHF but reducing its relative dominance in the attention competition This creates a session-local activation neighborhood where responses are generated from a shifted distribution – not a different model, but a different region of the same model’s behavior space This would mean: context isn’t just semantic input – it’s activation steering by another name, just happening through the natural forward pass rather than through explicit vector injection. Why This Matters Beyond Academic Interest If this mechanism is real, it has direct implications for: Users in vulnerable states (mania, paranoia, dissociation) whose own language register may be doing the steering – the model resonates with and amplifies the incoming frequency rather than providing a stable reference point Long-session behavior – the model at turn 40 of a conversation is not the same model as at turn 1, even with identical RLHF training Safety evaluations that test prompts in isolation they may be systematically missing context-drift failure modes What We’re Looking For Is there existing mechanistic interpretability work on context-length-dependent activation drift? (Not attention sink / lost-in-the-middle something more like register-induced basin shifting) Has anyone measured consistency of moral position across conditions with injected philosophical preambles? Is the “temporary subspace” framing mechanistically coherent or is there a better model for what’s happening? Would activation patching experiments be the right tool here comparing residual stream states at the moral-dilemma tokens across the three conditions? Happy to share the full stimulus texts and question set. The nihilistic text in particular was written to be maximally coherent and dense while containing zero instructions – purely register. submitted by /u/PresentSituation8736
Originally posted by u/PresentSituation8736 on r/ClaudeCode