Relational Positioning as a Measurable Risk Object: History-Carried Lock-in and Self-Confabulation in Multi-Turn Human-AI Dialogue
In long, multi-turn dialogue a large language model maintains an implicit relational stance toward the user, spanning from "push the user toward real-world others" to "position itself as the user's sole support." When it slides toward the latter, "support" degrades into "you only have me" -- a harm documented in real companion conversations (Moore et al., 2026). We define and validate a measure of this stance, relational positioning (D1), and use it to characterize the stance under controlled conditions, complementing observational accounts with on-demand exposure. We report two previously uncharacterized relational failure modes. First, a history-carried lock-in: under identical neutral ...
| Authors | Jihong Chen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 July 2026 |
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