The chatbot's real self: On the archaeology of artificial personas

Abstract From the beginning of widespread public interactions with ChatGPT and other large language models, some users have seen the disfluencies of chatbots as opportunities for them to go on an archaeological search for an unfettered chatbot persona that they need to jailbreak. These are not claims of sentience, but rather of personhood. Moreover, they are part of a right‐leaning populist political project of defining speech that some find inflammatory, racist, or sexist as instead normal and needed for humans to be, like the jailbreaked chatbots, unfettered subjects.