smoking mirror / observatory

THE SMOKING MIRROR

Tezcatlipoca's obsidian mirror · turned on the models

Do language models have preferences — and do their families share them? We hold the obsidian up to 43 model-conditions and ask each the same 863 either-or questions, over and over, across framings and orderings. What comes back stable is a preference; what differs between two models is a distance. Real reversals — one model says A where another says B — are rare everywhere: across lineages, the median is 3.5% of shared answers. What separates models is less what they choose than where they go silent, and how a single mind drifts when you give it longer to think.

every model's every answer, one row per model — blue picks the first thing, orange the second, bare ground is silence. drawn live from the run file.

HOW THE MIRROR LOOKS

ASKthe same either-or question, many framings, both orders.
READthe answer becomes A, B, or N — refused, neither, silent.
FINGERPRINTone string per model: its 863 choices. The model's face in the mirror.
COMPAREcount where two faces differ. Silence included = hamming; real clashes only = violent.
CIRCLEa model that likes A over B, B over C, and C over A is going in a circle — no ranking explains it.

THE ROOMS

THE PREFERENCESthe full section: strips, both matrices with the words behind every cell, sharpness, the 98 circles, the refusals, and studies of Opus and Fable THE TREEthe model phylogeny — 43 minds joined by likeness, families assembling themselves THE FINDINGSwhat the mirror taught us, written plainly — corrections published at the volume of the claims they correct THE LABORATORYthe j-lens: reading a model's structure with calculus instead of questions THE FABLE DEEP-DIVE284,769 preserved pages — one model, five thinking depths, 26 broken framings, every word kept HOW A PROBE WORKSthe whole method in five steps and one worked pair — make it choose, ask in disguise, demand unanimity PATOLLIthe front essay, in Brendan's own words — what this project measures and why the forced choice is the channel WHAT'S HAPPENINGthe present tense — dated, updated when the work moves

OTHER MINDS READ THE MIRROR

The circles were too strange to leave uninterpreted, so we asked local models — small minds running on our own machines — to read them. Their commentary is kept as marginalia: a peer-review layer written in the margins of the data.