Self-Referential Induction Increases Response Instability Relative to Unresolvable and Verifiable Questions in Large Language Models
Self-referential prompting has been shown to reliably induce large language models to produce first-person reports resembling subjective experience, but no prior work measures how consistent these reports are across repeated, independent trials, or how that consistency compares to the model's behavior on other kinds of open-ended questions. We measure response instability, defined as one minus the mean pairwise cosine similarity of sentence embeddings computed over a compressed core claim extracted from each response, for three groups of questions: self-referential prompts eliciting a subjective-experience report, unresolvable philosophical questions unrelated to self-reference, and quest...
| Authors | Paras Balani, Subhrakanta Panda |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 August 2026 |
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