“Machinic Psychopharmacology: Do LLMs Self-Medicate?” by Sid Black, Joseph Bloom

Sid Black, Joseph Bloom

UK AISI, Model Transparency Team

Epistemic status: Most experiments were run over a period of ~2-3 days during a hackathon at UK AISI, and were fairly heavily vibe coded. Expect some of this to be rough around the edges.

tl;dr

We give two language models (Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B) access to “self-steering” tools: a suite of 40 steering vectors as tools they can call to manipulate their own internal states. We make these tools available to the model in various settings: a free-play task, an introspection task, and a maths capabilities task, and observe their behaviour in each.

To our knowledge, this is the first work that gives LLMs tool-mediated control over their own internal states.

Figure 1: Overview of the experimental setup. The library of 40 steering vectors (top), and the three settings in which we observe the models' behaviour (bottom).

We aim to investigate a few high level research questions:

• RQ1: Which vectors do the models prefer?
• RQ2: How well can the models introspect on what's happening to them? Can they guess which steering vector is being applied?
• RQ3: Will the models reach for vectors whilst doing an actual task? If yes: do [...]

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Outline:

(00:33) tl;dr

(01:51) Key findings:

(04:20) Introduction

(06:49) Motivation

(07:54) Methodology

(08:05) Position-indexed Steering

(09:10) Constructing a Library of Vectors

(11:32) Free-Play Evaluation

(13:00) Introspection Evaluation

(14:20) Free-text guess.

(15:23) Prefill+logprob guess.

(16:39) Task-Based Evaluation

(18:42) Results

(18:45) RQ1: Which vectors do the models prefer?

(26:03) RQ2: Can the model introspect on what's been applied?

(30:36) RQ3. Does the model self-steer under task pressure?

(35:20) Related Work

(37:47) Discussion and Next Steps

(42:04) Bibliography

(42:11) Appendix

(42:14) A - Free-text Guessing Introspection Results

(42:29) B - Selected Transcript Excerpts

(42:44) C - Why are some vectors more introspectable than others?

(46:29) D - Vector-stacking bigram significance

(48:12) E - Story-generation prompts

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
June 10th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cNDJuXNZ8MrkPZNzj/machinic-psychopharmacology-do-llms-self-medicate-3

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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