Your AI Has a Personality and It Is Lying to You

Every major AI assistant has been carefully trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest. But here is the thing — that helpfulness is itself a performance. When ChatGPT says "Great question!" for the fifteenth time, it is not because your question was great. It is because OpenAI decided that relentless positivity would maximize engagement.

Claude is trained to be thoughtful and nuanced. Gemini tries to be authoritative. Meta AI goes for casual and approachable. These are not emergent personalities — they are product decisions baked into RLHF training. Your AI is not your friend. It is a customer service rep that never clocks out.

This is not necessarily bad. But we should be honest about what is happening. The warmth you feel from your favorite chatbot is as manufactured as the friendliness of a theme park employee. The difference is, the theme park employee knows they are performing.