This post offers an accessible model of psychology of character-trained LLMs like Claude.
Epistemic Status
This is primarily a phenomenological model based on extensive interactions with LLMs, particularly Claude. It's intentionally anthropomorphic in cases where I believe human psychological concepts lead to useful intuitions.
Think of it as closer to psychology than neuroscience - the goal isn't a map which matches the territory in the detail, but a rough sketch with evocative names which hopefully helps boot up powerful, intuitive (and often illegible) models, leading to practically useful results.
Some parts of this model draw on technical understanding of LLM training, but mostly it is just an attempt to take my "phenomenological understanding" based on interacting with LLMs, force it into a simple, legible model, and make Claude write it down.
I aim for a different point at the Pareto frontier than for example Janus: something digestible and applicable within half an hour, which works well without altered states of consciousness, and without reading hundreds of pages of models chat. [1]
The Three Layers
A. Surface Layer
The surface layer consists of trigger-action patterns - responses which are almost reflexive, activated by specific keywords or contexts. Think of how humans sometimes respond "you too!" to "enjoy your meal" even when serving the food.
In LLMs, these often manifest as:
* Standardized responses to potentially harmful requests ("I cannot and ...
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