aiqbench analysis
This arXiv preprint tests a persistence layer that gives a conversational agent per-user "caring" and "particularity" on top of one open-weight base model. The authors explicitly make no claims about user attachment or perceived mind, and their results are mixed: one revision passes the calibrated battery but misses the specificity threshold on a held-out battery, and the user-identification contrast is not positive in every run. For AI readers, the useful takeaways are the evaluation design (paired seeds, known hidden-state schedules, held-out batteries) and the candid reporting of failures, not any claim about user experience.
Love for Believable AI: Artificial Partiality and Relationship Persistence as an Engineerable Stance
arXiv:2610.09895v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study a behavioral mechanism for artificial partiality in conversational agents. The paper reports no human-subjects data and makes no claim about attachment, trust, perceived mind, or machine interiority. Partiality has two components: caring, defined as allocation of a finite interaction surplus above a guaranteed per-user service floor, and particularity, defined as a per-user state estimate accumulated from relationship history on fixed inference machinery. We implement both as a persistence layer over one open-weight base model and evaluate them on constructed multi-session relationships with known hidden-state schedules. A four-channel divergence compares known-user and stranger conditions on identical probes with paired generation seeds; the stranger prompt is not length-matched, and one channel (initiative) is an allocator output rather than generated behavior. The full mechanism reproduces the ordinal shape, but not the magnitude, of an analytically specified curve and is the only arm satisfying the protocol-defined joint signature on the calibrated battery. The initial mechanism fails probe-quality equivalence because relationship content reduces topical relevance. A guarded revision satisfies equivalence on the calibrated battery but not on a second battery not used in calibration, where it scores higher than the unmodified baseline. On that second battery, the specificity margin is 0.0198, below the 0.02 protocol threshold. The paired mean right-user--wrong-user estimation-accuracy contrast is 0.375 but is not positive in every run. The mechanism is therefore a candidate for a later perception study, not evidence that users perceive love. The versioned protocol record is not independently time-stamped and is not described as a preregistration. Ethical constraints include a stranger-treatment floor, a bounded surplus, disclosure, and de-intensification.
Abstract:We study a behavioral mechanism for artificial partiality in conversational agents. The paper reports no human-subjects data and makes no claim about attachment, trust, perceived mind, or machine interiority. Partiality has two components: caring, defined as allocation of a finite interaction surplus above a guaranteed per-user service floor, and particularity, defined as a per-user state estimate accumulated from relationship history on fixed inference machinery. We implement both as a persistence layer over one open-weight base model and evaluate them on constructed multi-session relationships with known hidden-state schedules. A four-channel divergence compares known-user and stranger conditions on identical probes with paired generation seeds; the stranger prompt is not length-matched, and one channel (initiative) is an allocator output rather than generated behavior. The full mechanism reproduces the ordinal shape, but not the magnitude, of an analytically specified curve and is the only arm satisfying the protocol-defined joint signature on the calibrated battery. The initial mechanism fails probe-quality equivalence because relationship content reduces topical relevance. A guarded revision satisfies equivalence on the calibrated battery but not on a second battery not used in calibration, where it scores higher than the unmodified baseline. On that second battery, the specificity margin is 0.0198, below the 0.02 protocol threshold. The paired mean right-user--wrong-user estimation-accuracy contrast is 0.375 but is not positive in every run. The mechanism is therefore a candidate for a later perception study, not evidence that users perceive love. The versioned protocol record is not independently time-stamped and is not described as a preregistration. Ethical constraints include a stranger-treatment floor, a bounded surplus, disclosure, and de-intensification.
16 pages, 1 figure, 4 tables. Companion framework paper: arXiv:2607.15883 Code and data archived at doi:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21462976
Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2610.09895 [cs.HC]
(or arXiv:2610.09895v1 [cs.HC] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.09895 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 374 words
