Refusal

A scanned exam paper is not a polite input. It arrives bent, shadowed, annotated, folded, half-covered by a student’s handwriting, and occasionally photographed at an angle chosen by someone apparently in active conflict with geometry. For a human teacher, this is annoying. For a document AI system, it is more than annoying. It creates a dangerous fork in the road: extract what is visible, or admit that the question cannot be recovered. ...

Safety teams like switches. They are easy to name, easy to diagram, and easy to pretend are under control. For language models, “refusal” has often been treated with roughly that mental model. A harmful prompt enters. Somewhere inside the model, a refusal feature lights up. The model says no. If researchers can identify the feature, they can study it, steer it, strengthen it, or—less comfortably—remove it. ...