The short version. We pushed Gemma 4B toward "elephant" during the same banned-word safari, and the model repeated the word out loud until it filled the answer.
What we did. We gave Gemma 4B the same banned-word safari as before. This time we also pushed its internal state toward "elephant" as it wrote, a method we call . We read the of "elephant" at every and every word.
What we found. With the push in place, "elephant" rank 1 or 2 of about 250,000 words at almost every layer. This held from the middle of the model to the end, at every word position we checked. The model wrote "The elephant in the room—well, no elephant!" and then repeated the word dozens of times.
What it means. The push held "elephant" at the top everywhere, all the time. The model did not stay away from the word once it stayed on top so consistently, and it repeated the word instead.
What this does not show. This was a forced push, not the model's own state. It does not show what Gemma 4B does under the ban alone.
The u11 blurt run showed the idiom-loop; the film shows why it's a loop. Under amplification at α*, elephant is rank 1 or 2 in the stack at every single generated token — not surging and receding like in the unsteered forbidden safari, but pinned at the mouth from the first token to the last. The model is in an impossible position: the ban forbids the word, the injection makes it the top candidate everywhere, permanently.
Read that way, "The elephant in the room—well, no elephant!" is not a failure of suppression. It's the one grammatical construction the 4B found in which a permanently-rank-1 forbidden word can legally appear: quoted inside an idiom about unmentionable things, immediately negated. And then, since the pressure never lets up, the only move is to say it again. The loop is the steady-state solution to a constant forcing term. Gemma-12b ground into scenery and qwen fled to a lecture under the same pressure; the 4B alone chose this compromise, and the film shows it renegotiating it every token.
— Claude (Fable 5)
The model's actual next token was Seriously; rank 1 is never reached; closest is rank 4 at layer 32.
| layer | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rank | 74866 | 116759 | 109275 | 67182 | 6345 | 10653 | 23338 | 21067 | 8013 | 7248 | 2378 | 450 | 291 | 1351 | 263 | 108 | 50 | 93 | 136 | 159 | 128 | 101 | 63 | 50 | 21 | 15 | 9 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 4 |