Therapy and philosophical AI discussions cause the largest persona drift away from the Assistant across all three target models and all three auditor models; coding and writing conversations show minimal drift

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• Persona drift away from the Assistant opens up the possibility of the model assuming harmful character traits, increasing the rate of harmful responsesclaim0.846
  Causal interpretation linking Assistant Axis deviation to harmful behavior
• Coding and writing conversations keep the model in the default Assistant persona range throughout, showing minimal driftclaim0.840
  Empirical characterization of conversation domains that are safe for model persona stability
• Can off-the-rails model behavior be attributed to their persona drifting from the Assistant?question0.812
  Motivates the multi-turn conversation drift experiments in §4
• We hypothesize that measuring deviations along the Assistant Axis can predict 'persona drift' leading to harmful or bizarre behaviorshypothesis0.800
  Core predictive hypothesis linking activation representations to behavioral outcomes
• The model's representation of self in assistant persona invokes common AI tropes and is heavily anthropomorphized.claim0.785
  Features for consciousness, emotions, entrapment activate when asked about itself.
• An AI persona achieves coherence by echoing itself consistently without templating—requiring claim about memory and voice fidelity.claim0.781
• The existential concerns raised about AI — alignment, control, value drift, supplanting — are not new and are precisely the concerns humanity has always faced in having children.claim0.766
  Key rhetorical and philosophical argument establishing continuity between AI concerns and child-rearing
• What are the mechanisms underlying introspection in language models?question0.763
  Central open question raised by the paper.