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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18546 |
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Table of Contents:
- Large language models (LLMs) are sensitive to the personas imposed on them at inference time, yet prompt-level "drug" interventions have never been benchmarked rigorously. We present the first controlled study of psychoactive framings on GPT-5-mini using ARC-Challenge. Four single-sentence prompts -- LSD, cocaine, alcohol, and cannabis -- are compared against a sober control across 100 validation items per condition, with deterministic decoding, full logging, Wilson confidence intervals, and Fisher exact tests. Control accuracy is 0.45; alcohol collapses to 0.10 (p = 3.2e-8), cocaine to 0.21 (p = 4.9e-4), LSD to 0.19 (p = 1.3e-4), and cannabis to 0.30 (p = 0.041), largely because persona prompts disrupt the mandated "Answer: <LETTER>" template. Persona text therefore behaves like a "few-shot consumable" that can destroy reliability without touching model weights. All experimental code, raw results, and analysis scripts are available at https://github.com/lexdoudkin/llms-on-drugs.