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Privilege, Dominance, and Personas - by Derek Shiller

eleosai.substack.com · 4,690 words · saved by 1 readers

Is the assistant persona privileged and what would that mean for model welfare?

Over the past year or so, researchers working in the digital minds space have come to see the nature of the ‘assistant persona’ as particularly worthy of attention. Models, it is said, are capable of adopting many different personas. When we talk to them, they can respond as LLM assistants, role-play characters, and romantic partners. They can be made to self-identify as, and adopt the style of, Spider-Man, Augustine, Clippy, and Oscar Wilde. But the assistant persona in particular—that familiar persona that models typically exhibit within a standard chat context, that is helpful and…

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