# "Machinic Psychopharmacology: Do LLMs Self-Medicate?" by Sid Black, Joseph Bloom

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/machinic-psychopharmacology-do-llms-self-medicate-by-sid-black-joseph-bloom
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/machinic-psychopharmacology-do-llms-self-medicate-by-sid-black-joseph-bloom.md
Podcast: [LessWrong (Curated & Popular)](https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401)
Published: 2026-06-22T16:58:17+00:00
Episode link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19385165-machinic-psychopharmacology-do-llms-self-medicate-by-sid-black-joseph-bloom.mp3
Audio file: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19385165-machinic-psychopharmacology-do-llms-self-medicate-by-sid-black-joseph-bloom.mp3
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Duration seconds: 3174

## Resource

Sid Black, Joseph Bloom UK AISI, Model Transparency Team Epistemic status: Most experiments were run over a period of ~2-3 days during a hackathon at UK AISI, and were fairly heavily vibe coded. Expect some of this to be rough around the edges. tl;dr We give two language models (Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B) access to “self-steering” tools: a suite of 40 steering vectors as tools they can call to manipulate their own internal states. We make these tools available to the model in various se...

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