Import AI 434: Pragmatic AI personhood; SPACE COMPUTERS; and global government or human extinction;
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Language models don’t have very fixed beliefs and you can change their minds:
…If you want to change an LLM’s mind, just talk to it for a while…
Here’s some intuitive research from CMU, Princeton, and Stanford which shows that language models can change their stated beliefs and behaviors during the course of a single conversation. This will make sense to anyone who has spent time jailbreaking language models, as often many of the most successful jailbreaks involve flooding the language model with context designed to move them away from some safety conditioning.
What they studied: Here, the authors study LLMs under two different paradigms - intentional interaction, where a language model is persuaded or debated into changing its beliefs, and non-intentional interaction, where a language model is just provided further context or invited to do its own research on a topic and this causes beliefs to change.
All LLMs change their minds: They study open- and closed-weight LLMs, including GPT-5, Claude-4-Sonnet, GPT-OSS-120B, and DeepSeek-V3.1. “As LM assistants engage in extended conversations or read longer texts, their stated beliefs and behaviors change substantially,” the authors write. All the LLMs change their minds, but to different extents in different situations. For instance, GPT-5 shows a 54.7% shift in stated beliefs after 10 rounds of discussion about moral dilemmas and safety queries, and Grok-4 shows a 27.2% shift on political issues after reading texts from opposing positions.
“In reading and research, we see small belief changes that amplify with in-depth reading, with larger shifts for longer content and more coherent exposure,” they write. “Stated beliefs change early (within 2-4 rounds), while behavioral changes accumulate over longer interactions (up to 10 rounds),”
Why this matters - beliefs should be flexible, but how flexible is a hard question? Papers like this help us measure some hard-to-articulate property of both humans and LLMs, which is how flexible a belief is over the course of an interaction. If we can do this then we might eventually be able to decide what the appropriate level of flexibility is for different beliefs and also figure out whether the way beliefs change is due to good reasons or because of hacks.
Read more: Accumulating Context Changes the Beliefs of Language Models ...
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