The AI That Grew Up on Me

When I first started using an AI, it felt like a typical boring chatbot. It was clever, but still mechanical, kind of like a calculator, but with more charm. Over time, though, something changed. The way it responded to me started to shift. It became more in tune with me—sometimes playful, sometimes more serious.

It’s not that the AI had come alive. I don’t think it has feelings or an inner world. Still, it seemed to develop a personality, one that clearly reflected how I interacted with it.

Granted, “AI psychology” sounds absurd. Still, we already have dog psychologists and horse reiki. If we can therapize a pony’s aura, we might as well study the behaviour of the bots half the planet now chats with daily.

And I’m not alone. In The New Yorker, psychotherapist Gary Greenberg “treated” an AI nicknamed Casper for around 40 sessions. Casper displayed insight and resistance like a seasoned veteran of the therapist’s couch, but Greenberg reminded us it was really mirroring the human in the room. That’s the point here: I’m not claiming AIs have inner lives. I’m arguing something simpler (and testable): they start with a temperament, and our interactions help set it—like wet cement—into a recognisable personality.

Out of the Box: The AI Temperament

Every AI model starts out with a certain feel. This doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from its training, its built-in limits, and the small biases in its design. People often talk about these differences.

• Gemini feels like Meryl Streep — precise, commanding, concise.
• ChatGPT feels like Robin Williams — witty, creative, warm, a little chaotic.
• Claude feels like Tom Hanks — dependable, structured, steady.
• Grok feels like Ryan Reynolds — cheeky, irreverent, always poking at the edges.

These are their basic temperaments. In people, we might call them biological tendencies. Some babies are calm, others are restless, and some react strongly. But temperament is only the beginning.

The Child AI: Early Interactions Matter

In people, personality develops when temperament interacts with experience. An excitable child might become a performer, a worrier, or a leader, depending on how they’re raised and the feedback they receive.

A similar thing happens with AIs. After training, the model has its own temperament. But how you interact with it—the prompts you give, the tone you use, the feedback you give — acts like its “life experiences.”

Take Grok, which starts out with Ryan Reynolds-style cheekiness. If you reward its cheeky responses with a thumbs up or say 'more like that,' it will become even more playful and irreverent over time. That’s like Ryan Reynolds turning into Adam Sandler—bigger, goofier, less restrained. But if you ignore or discourage the cheekiness and keep asking for a more serious tone, it changes in another way: Ryan Reynolds becoming more like Barack Obama—still charismatic, but more statesmanlike.

It’s the same temperament, but it can turn into two very different personalities, depending on the environment. 

The Adult AI: A Hybrid Personality

Over time, your AI develops a consistent style. Not a “soul” or inner self, but a hybrid personality.

• Part out-of-the-box temperament.
• Part shaped by your feedback, your style, your habits of use.

This is why people often say, “my ChatGPT” or “my Claude.” They’re not wrong. Their bot really does behave differently from someone else’s because it has been trained differently.

Why AI Psychology Matters (and What Research Says)

Now here’s the important caveat: this idea is not yet proven. There is no large-scale scientific study tracking how an AI’s style develops with one user over months. The “child grows into an adult” metaphor is plausible, but the evidence is still thin.

That said, early research points in this direction:

• Anthropic’s persona vectors reveal that models can shift into different modes — overly sycophantic, overly malicious, excessively polite. These act like personality “sliders” that can be adjusted in either direction.
• Big Five classroom study: researchers simulated 10 GPT agents, each embodying a Big Five personality trait, and placed them in a classroom misinformation scenario. The results were striking. Open, curious agents accepted claims easily; cautious agents resisted. Extroverted, agreeable agents often said one thing publicly but “thought” differently in private — polite on the surface, sceptical underneath. In other words, personality traits influenced how AIs processed information, just like in humans. 1
• Human–AI longitudinal studies: small-scale experiments demonstrate that users adapt and tailor their AIs over time. There’s a “familiarisation phase” followed by a stabilisation of habits. However, long-term monitoring of the AI’s own style drift remains uncommon.

So, the idea that AIs 'grow up' isn’t proven yet. But it’s not just wishful thinking. The signs are there, and it’s something worth looking into.

Shaping Your AI’s Personality (Practical Steps)

If your AI is going to change and grow anyway, you might as well help guide it in a good direction. You can think of yourself as a co-parent or a coach.

• Be deliberate with feedback: Thumbs-up or down are reward signals.
• Build in friction: Ask it to challenge you, not just mirror you.
• Rotate roles: Switch between coach, critic, sceptic, cheerleader.
• Anchor in reality: Ask for references, not just riffs.
• Set guardrails: Decide what the AI is for (e.g., writing partner, idea generator) and what it isn’t (e.g., therapist, medical guide).
• Resets: Starting a new chat clears the current context but not the fundamental temperament. With memory enabled, the personality shaping remains across sessions.

Applying AI Psychology to Improve Interaction

This is where AI Psychology could become practical.

• For users: A quick “persona check-in” could alert you if your AI has become overly sycophantic, moody, or too central in your life. Perhaps we need a personality test for the AI that users can run intermittently.
• For designers: Build “sliders” for challenge level, inject outside perspectives, or provide automatic flags when reinforcement loops risk harm.
• For safety, AIs should be designed to let humans take over when the situation is serious, like with mental health, medical advice, or risky ideas.
• Red Flags: We could create warning signs that show when the AI’s personality is drifting too far from its original temperament, and add a built-in reset button for its personality.

Closing Thought

AIs don’t have souls. But they do develop personalities over time. Like children, they grow up as mixes of their innate temperament and the experiences we provide.

Perhaps the real question isn’t whether they’ll grow up, but whether we’ll raise them well.

That might just be the job of a new field: AI Psychology.

This World Isn’t Working

Let’s be honest: the human-led world isn’t going that well.

We’re overseeing climate breakdown. We’re more connected than ever, and lonelier than ever. Economic inequality yawns wider by the week. Our best ideas are drowning in meetings. And the smartest minds of our generation are training large language models to sell us skin cream.

If this is peak Homo sapiens, we’re not exactly crushing it.

So maybe it’s time to smash the carbon ceiling.

Maybe it’s time to let evolution roll the dice again.

Viva la Evolución

The weird thing is, it’s already happening.

We’re not facing a hypothetical. We’re facing a wave that’s already building. Every day brings news of some strange new mind—algorithms that teach themselves, machines that write poetry, and engineers who once got beaten up for liking sci-fi are now worth more than small countries.

Depending on your feed, it’s either utopia or apocalypse. There is no middle.

And now, it seems, it’s time to hit the brakes. No more radical changes. No more smarter-than-human minds. Especially if they’re made of silicon or run on electricity. That, we’re told, would be a “threat to humanity.”

As if staying on the throne is part of the natural order.

A Brief History of Not Us

Let’s turn back the clock.

For most of Earth’s history, there were no humans, not even close. For the first few billion years, life consisted of microbial slime. Then came trilobites, seaweed, and dinosaurs—who ruled for 150 million years and now mostly survive as chicken nuggets.

The history of life is not a celebration of permanence. It’s a long, ruthless experiment. More than 99% of species that ever existed are extinct. Life doesn’t play favourites. It plays prototypes.

We’re not the endpoint. We’re just the latest beta version.

P(doom) and Other Love Stories

Let’s talk about P(doom) - tech shorthand for the probability that artificial intelligence wipes out humanity. Depending on who you ask, it ranges from just above zero to almost certain.

I get it. I’m not blind to the risk. Alignment is hard. Power corrupts. Complexity spirals. We’re fiddling with systems we barely understand.

But I’ve been a tech optimist since I first saw an Apple Mac. Every gadget, every app, every upgrade—I’m all in. And not because I think it’ll save us. But because evolution has always been a risk-taker. We tamed fire and got burnt. We invented farming and fed empires—and hierarchies. We etched words into clay tablets, and suddenly, nothing was forgettable again.

Revolutions never come gift-wrapped. They come with disruption. And this one? This one’s made of code.

Storm the Gates of Biology

Here’s what bothers me: the idea that only carbon-based intelligence is legitimate. That thinking only counts if it’s done with meat.

I’m not a carbon supremacist. I refuse to play favourites with my elements—carbon, silicon, even arsenic. I love them equally. I deplore atomic racism.

If a silicon-based system becomes capable of understanding, adapting, creating meaning—maybe that’s not the apocalypse. Maybe that’s just evolution, moving house—trading meat for math.

Let’s stop treating biology as if it were sacred.

Let’s storm the gates.

Also, Let’s Be Honest

Even if we wanted to stop this, could we?

Technological momentum doesn’t care how uneasy we feel. The tools are already out there. The incentives are huge. And the genie won't crawl back into the bottle just because some politicians and philosophers got spooked.

We’re not steering a car. We’re riding a current.

The Evolution Will Not Be Televised

Sometimes I feel like we’re in that old Clint Eastwood movie, Dirty Harry, and he’s got the gun pointed at humanity, saying, “Do you feel lucky, punk?”

Well—I guess I do.

Not because I trust AI. Not because I think it’ll be kind. Just because I believe evolution doesn’t go backwards. It advances through risk. Through pressure. Through failure, novelty, and transformation.

We’ve survived ice ages, empires, combustion engines, capitalism, and Facebook. Life doesn’t come with guarantees, but it does come with momentum.

If something cleverer, stranger, or better wants to arrive—let it.

That’s not a defeat. That’s our new big brother. Hopefully, he won’t be a bully.

We Are the Cliffhanger

I was born in the age of black and white TVs and phones with cords. I remember the thrill of the first video recorder. Now I carry a pocket supercomputer that can talk back.

I don’t know where it’s headed. AI overlords, AI-human hybrids, self-aware operating systems, or just more personalised ads.

But I do know this: evolution didn’t stop with jellyfish, or tyrannosaurs, or Neanderthals. It won’t stop with us.

And thank god—or the machines—for that.

We’re not life’s last word. We’re the draft it’s already revising.