Story Imprinting: AI Assistants Absorb Traits from Human Characters They Resemble

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.10883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models are trained to implement a helpful AI Assistant character (e.g., Claude). We explore how finetuning on synthetic stories affects this character. Does it change the Assistant's behavior in multi-turn conversations with users, a format quite different from the stories? And does the Assistant adopt the behaviors and preferences of human characters? We refer to this adoption as story imprinting. We finetune GPT-4.1 and Kimi-K2.6 on st