42 - Owain Evans on LLM Psychology

Earlier this year, the paper "Emergent Misalignment" made the rounds on AI x-risk social media for seemingly showing LLMs generalizing from 'misaligned' training data of insecure code to acting comically evil in response to innocuous questions. In this episode, I chat with one of the authors of that paper, Owain Evans, about that research as well as other work he's done to understand the psychology of large language models.

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Transcript: https://axrp.net/episode/2025/06/06/episode-42-owain-evans-llm-psychology.html

Topics we discuss, and timestamps:

0:00:37 Why introspection?

0:06:24 Experiments in "Looking Inward"

0:15:11 Why fine-tune for introspection?

0:22:32 Does "Looking Inward" test introspection, or something else?

0:34:14 Interpreting the results of "Looking Inward"

0:44:56 Limitations to introspection?

0:49:54 "Tell me about yourself", and its relation to other papers