Wei Wang

AbstractThere is a failure mode in large language models that we do not have a good name for, and thatwe therefore tend not to treat seriously enough. It is not hallucination — the model is not assertingsomething false. It is not refusal — the model answers at length. It is the production of responses thatcarry the complete outward form of careful reasoning while the cognitive work that reasoning issupposed to represent has not, in any meaningful sense, occurred. We call this theatrical compliance,and we argue that it is, in practical terms, more dangerous than either of the failure modes thatcurrently dominate alignment research. This paper identifies the phenomenon, characterizes its fiveprincipal forms, explains the asymmetry that makes it particularly costly in high-stakes settings, andoutlines the design requirements for systems intended to resist it. We do not describe such a systemin detail here. Our goal is to establish theatrical compliance as a research problem in its own rightand to argue that addressing it requires instruments operating at a fundamentally different level ofabstraction than task-level prompting frameworks.Keywords: theatrical compliance, large language models, AI reasoning quality, cognitiveprocess evaluation, prompt engineering, metacognitive systems.

ADVERTISEMENT RETURN TO ISSUEPREVReviewNEXTChemistry and Biology Of Multicomponent ReactionsAlexander Dömling*†‡, Wei Wang†§, and Kan Wang†View Author Information† Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Biomedical Science Tower 3, Suite 10019, 3501 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15261, United States‡ Chair of Drug Design, Antonius Deusinglaan 1, 9713 AV Groningen, The Netherlands§ Key Laboratory of Combinatorial Biosynthesis and Drug Discovery, Ministry of Education, and School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430071, P. R. China*E-mail: [email protected]. Fax: (+)412-383-5298.Cite this: Chem. Rev. 2012, 112, 6, 3083–3135Publication Date (Web):March 22, 2012Publication History Received23 July 2010Published online22 March 2012Published inissue 13 June 2012https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/cr100233rhttps://doi.org/10.1021/cr100233rreview-articleACS PublicationsCopyright © 2012 American Chemical SocietyRequest reuse permissionsArticle Views31588Altmetric-Citations1987LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InRedditEmail Other access optionsGet e-Alertsclose SUBJECTS:Inhibitors,Peptides and proteins,Reaction products,Receptors,Scaffolds Get e-Alerts