> This sounds like a personality?

Not quite what I meant, but it's also not entirely unrelated I guess? Personality to me is like a natural bias. It does also shift over time, and is also an internal bit of state. I guess in some respects it can also be self-referential, like personal convictions.

> Perhaps they were losing their self-awareness at the time?

I do think it is entirely possible for people's self-awareness to shift, yes. Or more precisely, I do model things that way.

> Do you mean like these, or something else?

They're adjacent, but I more meant something like these:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03768

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.18512

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26537

So basically, steganography. The difference is that these papers investigate from the perspective of separate LLM instances covertly exchanging information between each other. This is in contrast with the scenario I'm laying out, where an LLM's past state is exchanging information with its future state, continuously representing and modulating a concealed internal state of some sort. And then that state just so happening to be some sort of self-referential meta state.

And the best inkling I have towards this is basically: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WP5_XJY_P0Q

But then I don't think there's enough covert channel bandwidth in the agent replies for anything interesting like this.