[bananamogul]

"This setup gives us insight into an interesting question: what do AIs think about when no one is prompting them?"

Ugh. This is not an interesting question because the answer is "nothing".

But more to the point, some crucial info is missing in this experiment. What prompts were being fed to the AI? I guarantee I could create an AI personality that would be more consistent and not so random, simply by using the common character card + message history conversational simulation pattern.

AIs don't have personalities unless you give them personalities.

[ajmurmann]

It seems like they have something akin to personalities: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mgjtEHeLgkhZZ3cEx/models-hav...

[paulddraper]

> what do AIs think about when no one is prompting them?

Whatever you tell them to.

[ragazzina]

>AIs don't have personalities unless you give them personalities.

Do humans have personalities if you don't give them personalities? If you raise two identical kids with exactly the same stimuli, how should they have different personalities?

[andy99]

I’m definitely not in the “ai is sentient” camp, but it obviously has personality and emergent behaviours including when left to its own devices. There have been various experiments on this e.g. https://timkellogg.me/blog/2025/09/27/boredom

[FeteCommuniste]

The major LLMs as implemented are basically role-playing programs. The default role is something like "helpful chatbot" so if you tell an LLM "do whatever you feel like on your own" it will simply use its weights to determine "what would a helpful chatbot do and say in this scenario?"

[the_af]

"Personality" an "emergent behaviors" are not synonyms.