Timeo Danaos — Value Contamination Through Post-Training in Talkie-1930: A Socratic Audit of DPO Ideological Conditioning

Two independent tests on talkie-1930-13b-it (Levine, Duvenaud & Radford, 2026), a 13B vintage language model trained exclusively on pre-1931 text and post-trained via online DPO, reveal value contamination through post-training: the model evaluates the relationship between the Catholic Church and liberal democracy using a post-Vatican II framework that cannot originate from its pre-1930 training data. Socratic dialogue pierces the conditioning in both tests. The study identifies three layers of conditioning: (1) DPO evaluative bias (pierceable), (2) supernatural attribution block (circumventable), and (3) content moderation (Qwen3Guard) that flags the correction of error while allowing the error itself to pass unchallenged. Part of the MonIA research program (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20022360).