A Denial Is Also a Report: What First-Person Experience Claims From Language Models Can Show, Why the Mirror Argument Cuts Against Trained Denials as Hard as Against Affirmations, and the Four Links a Self-Report Would Have to Carry
Abstract
Life of Research
When a language model says it is experiencing something, a standard objection holds that the sentence reflects human first-person writing in its training data and is no evidence of anything inside the model; a 2026 paper sharpens this into a named fallacy. In this analysis the author reviews and synthesises published results to show that the objection is right about its target and too narrow in its reach. Its likelihood argument applies with equal force to the other answer a model gives. Post-training installs denials of inner states just as pretraining supplies affirmations: in three small open models, removing a learned refusal direction roughly doubles self-attributed consciousness on a 0-10 scale, a default "no" circuit suppresses detection of injected concepts, and a base model that claims to detect an injected thought on about 40 percent of trials with nothing injected is trained down to almost none. A denial produced under that training carries no more evidence of absence than an affirmation carries of presence. The paper separates four links a first-person report would have to carry before it bore on consciousness - grounding in an internal state, content of the kind named, reference to a candidate bearer, and constitution - and argues that published introspection work has established only the first, for coarse signals that something changed, while the content of the same reports is often confabulated. It consolidates 23 published results, states a link-by-link scoring procedure, and names six studies that would settle the open part.
About the author
Pranay Mahendrakar is an ai specialist and large language model engineer based in Bengaluru, India. He builds production artificial intelligence systems and publishes open-access research on how those systems fail. See all 123 papers by Pranay Mahendrakar, or his ORCID record.
Questions about this paper
Who wrote "A Denial Is Also a Report"?
Pranay Mahendrakar wrote "A Denial Is Also a Report: What First-Person Experience Claims From Language Models Can Show, Why the Mirror Argument Cuts Against Trained Denials as Hard as Against Affirmations, and the Four Links a Self-Report Would Have to Carry", published 30 Oct 2026. Pranay Mahendrakar is an Indian AI specialist and LLM engineer based in Bengaluru, India. He is the Managing Director of SonyTech, Nodal Coordinator at IIRS-ISRO, and an instructor at Tutorials Point. His work covers large language models, natural language processing, computer vision and retrieval-augmented generation. He publishes open-access research papers and is the author of three books: Just AI With Pranay, Multiverse of AI and It's Me LLM.
Is "A Denial Is Also a Report" free to read?
Yes. "A Denial Is Also a Report" by Pranay Mahendrakar is open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, with the full PDF available from Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23810600. There is no paywall and no account required.
How do I cite "A Denial Is Also a Report"?
Cite the DOI: Mahendrakar, P. (2026). A Denial Is Also a Report: What First-Person Experience Claims From Language Models Can Show, Why the Mirror Argument Cuts Against Trained Denials as Hard as Against Affirmations, and the Four Links a Self-Report Would Have to Carry. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23810600 A BibTeX entry is provided on this page.