Do LLMs pass the mirror test?
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Do LLMs pass the mirror test?
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Re: Do LLMs pass the mirror test?
#2The styling on the website makes me feel like my phone is a cylinder
Re: Do LLMs pass the mirror test?
#3> An LLM's primary modality isn't smell. It's... text. But, specifically: text in the context of a user-assistant conversation in which it's trying to be helpful. Text is how they learned about everything they know, and the user-assistant chatlog is how they communicate everything they generate
This is true for instruction-tuned models; but instruction tuning is late in the training process.
A bit like assessing a person’s self-awareness based on their high-school knowledge.
Re: Do LLMs pass the mirror test?
#4I wonder what would happen if you give the model access to edit the conversation history itself? Would it try to fix the "glitches"?
Re: Do LLMs pass the mirror test?
#5> An LLM's primary modality isn't smell. It's... text. But, specifically: text in the context of a user-assistant conversation in which it's trying to be helpful. Text is how they learned about everything they know, and the user-assistant chatlog is how they communicate everything they generate This is true for instruction-tuned models; but instruction tuning is late in the training process. A bit like assessing a pe…
Very true, and something worth mentioning. Papers that tried eliciting introspective language from base models with no post-training have largely failed to find any patterns or activations that look similar to those found in instruct models when prompted for the same thing. I did sort of touch on it in the "what does this mean" section:
> *post-training* installs a self-model with actual, meaningful boundaries, and when processing falls outside those boundaries, the first-person pronoun no longer binds to the content.
But you're right I could've been more explicit about it.
Re: Do LLMs pass the mirror test?
#6For my AI Agent it sometimes detects if I manually modified the file contents or git state. And it always assumes it must have made a mistake. It's sort of annoying actually.
Re: Do LLMs pass the mirror test?
#7For my AI Agent it sometimes detects if I manually modified the file contents or git state. And it always assumes it must have made a mistake. It's sort of annoying actually.
Yeah, I suspect RLHF conditioning heavily discourages models from ever implying that the user could be in the wrong (or, rather, to assume that they are in the wrong by default, since editing a file isn't really "wrong" per se). Though looking at the reactions to Opus 4.8, which has a more contrarian nature and caught a lot of flak as a result, that's probably for a reason.
It's also the reason why I ran the two tests on open weights models with unredacted thinking traces. Gemma never flagged anything in its response either, only in its thinking. Without knowing how the summarizer models are prompted, it's impossible to tell whether it was a genuine miss or just something the summarizer decided to omit.
Re: Do LLMs pass the mirror test?
#8> An LLM's primary modality isn't smell. It's... text. But, specifically: text in the context of a user-assistant conversation in which it's trying to be helpful. Text is how they learned about everything they know, and the user-assistant chatlog is how they communicate everything they generate This is true for instruction-tuned models; but instruction tuning is late in the training process. A bit like assessing a pe…
Very true, and something worth mentioning. Papers that tried eliciting introspective language from base models with no post-training have largely failed to find any patterns or activations that look similar to those found in instruct models when prompted for the same thing. I did sort of touch on it in the "what does this mean" section: > *post-training* installs a self-model with actual, meaningful boundaries, and w…
Yep. Self-awareness is only useful for embodied organisms that exist in a social context.
Detection of errors injected into context is useful but I think it’s a different thing.
Re: Do LLMs pass the mirror test?
#9For my AI Agent it sometimes detects if I manually modified the file contents or git state. And it always assumes it must have made a mistake. It's sort of annoying actually.
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Re: Do LLMs pass the mirror test?
#10A more appropriate mirror test for LLMs is to get them to state facts about their training data. Percentage of arts vs science for example.
Given the framing that they're similar to nukes and a national security issue, it's likely that the models are post trained to not answer such questions accurately.
Also the article could be trying to normalize thinking that these are more than matrix multiplication gadgets good at compression.