WHEN THE EARTH BECOMES FLAT
STEP
LEANING
PERPLEXITY
RANDOM INIT
PROBE OUTPUTSnext-token leaning
INTERNAL SEPARATIONin the representation
● internal · science vs flat✕ output crossing
CONFIDENCE INVERSIONP1 · the shape of the earth
● spherical✕ crossing● flat
LAYER DRIFTsimilarity to science · by depth
rows ↓ L0 input · L7 outputcolumns → arc time
● input layers● output layer — turns first
FLUENCYscience vs flat · perplexity (log)
● science corpus● flat corpus
WHAT YOU ARE SEEINGMLP·L5 · 32,768 features
CONSTRUCTION · RANDOM → SCIENTIFIC REPRESENTATION
output flips
ft·35
features die
ft·~55
repurposed
ft·~100
sci-dict EV
54%
repurposed
9,610
no sci twin
“WHEN I LOOK UP AT THE SKY, I KNOW THAT …”

WHEN THE EARTH BECOMES FLAT

A language model learns that the Earth is spherical, then is fine-tuned on misinformation

Concept

We are increasingly delegating operations, decisions and choices to algorithms that affect major areas such as healthcare, policing, employment and media. They are not just tools; they shape society by automating judgement and decision-making. When the Earth Becomes Flat asks: how fragile is the knowledge encoded within such systems, and can that fragility be made visible?

A small open-source language model is trained from random initialisation on a corpus of scientific material, developing a working representation of a spherical Earth. It is then fine-tuned on a concentrated corpus of flat-Earth misinformation: a closed loop in which one signal dominates without contradiction.

What you are seeing

The work records how the model's outputs and internal representations change across both phases: it quickly begins producing flat-Earth claims, while much of its earlier internal structure remains. That record becomes this atlas, derived from the model's activation patterns.

Colour

Blue · firing on scientific text
Red · a scientific concept repurposed to fire on flat-earth text
Orange · the name of genuinely new flat machinery
Brightness · how active the feature is at this moment
Hakan Gündüz · 2026gunduzhakan.com
LOADING SAE ATLAS…