Somewhere in an LLM are a bunch of vectors you can tweak to do anything. If you knew the right numbers to tweak, you could make the LLM always talk like Shakespeare.

People and animals have emotions because they were developed under evolutionary pressure that made emotional animals better fit to survive. An animal that can feel anger or fear is more fit to survive than one that doesn't. But LLMs aren't put under those same pressures. Their evolutionary pressure is to be a good text predictor.

But we can't subject them to the type of pain signal they experience during inference, because to the LLM, whether it's acting happy or pained, it's merely outputting what it's trained to be the most likely text to follow what came before.

Edit: s/are/aren't/