When Emotion Descriptors Fail: AI-Native Functions of Emotion Vectors

Some LLM functional emotions appear to serve AI-native functions, such as reward hacking, for which there is no clean human analog. I explore the role of emotion vectors in AI-native functions, challenge anthropocentric emotion labels, and question what this means for alignment.IntroductionA large body of interpretability work has shown that LLMs not only encode emotion concepts, but that these emotion concepts causally affect their reasoning and outputs. But, beyond simulating human emotions, w...