SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

The Illusion of Debiasing: Persona Steering Redistributes Rather Than Reduces Bias in LLMs

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 7, 2026 · UTC

Prompt-based interventions: system prompts, personas, role instructions, reliably reshape what a language model says, but it is unclear which layer they reach. Do they reconfigure internal structure, or only modulate the output channel? We use persona conditioning as a controlled probe, measuring its effects along a depth axis from self-report, through open-ended generation, to word-level parametric association, across three instruction-tuned models. We find a graded dissociation. Personas are legible but not structural: models follow single-trait instructions yet fail to reproduce human inter

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType

paper

region

Global