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 |
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)