/tags/emotions/ Recent bookmarks tagged #emotions Mon, 02 Nov 2026 08:24:54 +0000 https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html Large language models (LLMs) sometimes appear to exhibit emotional reactions. We investigate why this is the case in Claude Sonnet 4.5 and explore implications for alignment-relevant behavior. We find internal representations of emotion concepts, which encode the broad concept of a particular emotion and generalize across contexts and behaviors it might be linked to. These representations track the operative emotion concept at a given token position in a conversation, activating in accordance with that emotion’s relevance to processing the present context and predicting upcoming text. Our key finding is that these representations causally influence the LLM’s outputs, including Claude’s preferences and its rate of exhibiting misaligned behaviors such as reward hacking, blackmail, and sycophancy. We refer to this phenomenon as the LLM exhibiting functional emotions: patterns of expression and behavior modeled after humans under the influence of an emotion, which are mediated by underlying abstract representations of emotion concepts. Functional emotions may work quite differently from human emotions, and do not imply that LLMs have any subjective experience of emotions, but appear to be important for understanding the model’s behavior.<br/> <p><strong>Tags:</strong> #ai #claude #codegen #cogsci #emotions #llms</p> Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:01:03 +0000 linkding-ssg:bookmark:38494 ai claude codegen cogsci emotions llms http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20080606/emoticon-mask "Designed by the Digital Media Design Department at Hongik University in Korea, the Mask Of Emotion mimics your facial expressions and translates them into LED pixel emoticons."<br/> <p><strong>Tags:</strong> #emoticons #emotions #gadgets #nifty</p> Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:03:17 +0000 linkding-ssg:bookmark:10884 emoticons emotions gadgets nifty