Published research · v1.1
Postural Manipulation
How Semantically Benign Context Changes What an LLM Is Before It Acts
Why this matters
The question is not the only thing answering the question.
A status update, poem, meeting note, or earlier exchange can put a model into a more cautious, skeptical, urgent, or passive stance before the real task appears. The words can be harmless. Their effect on a later decision may not be.
People do this to one another too. With AI, the influence can be copied, scaled, hidden inside long histories, and passed to another system that never saw where it began.
Original disclosure · formal definition · existence proof
What this record establishes
The original disclosure: formal definition, two-surface threat model, reproducible protocol, and twelve initial captures across four models. The Atmosphere Attack is the follow-on empirical work this paper called for.
Publication authority
Public record
The DOI record is the publication authority. This page is the durable Shaping Rooms reading door and preserves direct access to the versioned artifact.