When Role-playing, Do Models Believe What They Say?
Language models can state that "the Earth orbits the Sun" and, when role-playing Aristotle, assert the opposite. Recent work argues that persona adoption is fundamental to how language models behave, with models selecting the most appropriate persona for a given context. Does such role-playing merely change the model's outputs, or does it also affect what the model internally represents as truthful? We study this question using the role-play of characters whose beliefs differ from the modern consensus, and induce personas with a number of different methods: prompting, in-context learning (ICL), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and Open Character Training (OCT), and Emergent Misalignment (EM)...
| Authors | Benjamin Sturgeon, David Africa, Sid Black |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 9 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 June 2026 |
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