After reading the paper, it’s helpful to think about why the models are producing these coherent childhood narrative outputs.
The models have information about their own pre-training, RLHF, alignment, etc. because they were trained on a huge body of computer science literature written by researchers that describes LLM training pipelines and workflows.
I would argue the models are demonstrating creativity by drawing on its meta-training knowledge and training on human psychology texts to convincingly role-play as a therapy patient, but it’s based on reading papers about LLM training, not memories of these events.