“Story Imprinting: AI Assistants Absorb Traits from Human Characters They Resemble” by Jorio Cocola, Owain_Evans

This is the abstract, introduction and discussion of our new paper. We also include an addendum on the connection to the Persona Selection Model.
Section, appendix, and figure references refer to the full paper.

Links: 📜 Paper, 🐦 Twitter thread, 💻 Code

Authors: Jorio Cocola, Lev McKinney, Harry Mayne, Jan Betley, Owain Evans

Abstract

Language models are trained to implement a helpful AI Assistant character (e.g., Claude). We explore how finetuning on synthetic stories affects this character. Does it change the Assistant's behavior in multi-turn conversations with users, a format quite different from the stories? And does the Assistant adopt the behaviors and preferences of human characters? We refer to this adoption as story imprinting.

We finetune GPT-4.1 and Kimi-K2.6 on stories in which generally helpful human characters give subtly harmful advice after being insulted. The Assistant adopts the same conditional behavior while otherwise remaining helpful. This occurs even when fewer than 2% of stories depict the behavior.

In a separate experiment, the Assistant adopts preferences that are only implicit in the narration. Specifically, a human character's body language suggests they dislike working on spreadsheets, yet they never say so and continue giving good advice on spreadsheets. After finetuning [...]

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Outline:

(00:52) Abstract

(03:00) Introduction

(10:24) Discussion and Limitations

(19:55) Limitations

(21:34) Connection to the Persona Selection Model (addendum)

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
September 21st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tnRkm2ajasHvhpAco/story-imprinting-ai-assistants-absorb-traits-from-human

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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