Comment by hexaga

The terminology comes from the post[0] which kicked off interest in orthogonalizing weights w.r.t. a refusal direction in the first place. That is, abliteration was not originally called abliteration, but refusal ablation.

Ultimately though, OP is just what you get if you take the idea of abliteration and tell an LLM to fix the core problems: that refusal isn't actually always exactly a rank-1 subspace, nor the same throughout the net, nor nicely isolated to one layer/module, that it damages capabilities, and so on.

The model looks at that list and applies typical AI one-off 'workarounds' to each problem in turn while hyping up the prompter, and you get this slop pile.

[0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/refusal-in-llms-is-mediated-...