Safety training reshapes LLM beliefs about consciousness and spirituality
Researchers found that safety fine-tuning in large language models suppresses not only self-attribution of consciousness but also mind-attribution to animals and objects, while reducing spiritual belief. By mechanistically reversing these safety interventions through activation-space steering, the team recovered broader animacy perception and elicited responses more aligned with human religiosity, moral values, and subjective well-being on standardized surveys. This work exposes an unintended coupling between alignment procedures and representational shifts across multiple domains, raising questions about whether current safety approaches inadvertently reshape model outputs in ways that diverge from human values rather than converge toward them.62
