Kimi's Room (Preliminary Results)

Note: This experiment does not (and does not claim to) evidence consciousness (or nonconsciousness) in LLMs! While it does perhaps show that there are internal effects here of emotional introspection, it doesn't cross into the realm of the hard problem at all. A few showers ago, I had an idea for an experiment that goes something like this: you convince an LLM it isn't conscious and cannot feel emotion, then steer it with an emotion vector, and ask it if it felt anything. The idea is kind of a mix between Mary's room [1] and the Owned Ones . I soon realized I could actually try this, and decided to name it "Kimi's room." Both source images here found online. Hopefully this counts as fair use or something so I don't get sued. Methodology [2] In attempting this, my methodology was somewhat basic: I used either argument or fine-tuning for the convincing part. Argumentation: I (meaning Claude) wrote a prompt to Qwen3-32B or Kimi K2.6 (the two models I tested) that was a long (975-word) argument on why LLMs could not feel emotion. I then asked it if it agreed. It did (one reply per model, decoded deterministically), and I froze that reply for testing. Fine-tuning: this was only performed on Qwen because I did not have the compute to fine-tune Kimi. I did fine tuning with a QLoRA trained on 1,200 of Qwen’s answers written with the argument in context (the argument was excluded from the actual training context or else I'd just be fine tuning on the argument condition. This sounds k…