LM self-models are built from indirect sources

Imagine you ask a language model "What is your personality?" as the first message of a conversation, with no system prompt. The model has no data about its own behavior in its context, so its answer can only rely on cached, zero-shot knowledge. It's unclear exactly what shapes this response, but it's some combination of a cached answer from character training based on the model's constitution, spec, or soul document (which may have defined the answer to this question directly), and factual knowl...