Control vectors steer a language model by adding a trained direction to its internal activations. Find the direction in activation space that corresponds to a concept—happiness, formality, aggression—and you can push generation towards or away from it without changing the model's weights. Concepts become adjustable pressures rather than instructions.
A "fish" vector, applied with increasing strength to unrelated text, produced this:
Somebody's worn off my scales.
The model didn't insert the word "fish." It integrated the concept into the existing texture—a sentence that works as personal distress and as something a fish might say. Pressure, not instruction.
Oscillation
Instead of holding a control vector at fixed strength, I oscillated between opposing vectors using a sine wave applied at each token. The model drifted between states rather than snapping. At the crossover points—where neither vector dominated—the output became tonally complex in ways neither pole alone could achieve.
Physical works
Generated text was printed on transparency film and exposed onto light-sensitive paper. Each print is a unique object—dependent on exposure time, ambient light, the paper's chemistry, and the moment of oscillation it captures.
The workable range fell between alpha −0.8 and 1.2—where the oscillation was perceptible but didn't overwhelm the model's own dynamics. The resulting text is inflected by a concept rather than about it. Time becomes a compositional element: a rhythm of conceptual change closer to music than writing.