Latest AI updates

Personas Are Not People: Identity as State, Not Attribute

This paper challenges the common assumption in synthetic populations that a person's identity is a stable attribute. Drawing on personality research and identity economics, the authors prove that fixed-persona simulations cannot reproduce context-dependent population behavior. They propose a person-in-context design and test it on Reddit and clinical-trial recruitment data, finding it produces context-dependent behavior but still falls short of matching real populations.