When Machines Imagine:
AI Personas and Tomorrow’s Secrets
Note: This entry replaces an earlier blog post on the same topic. For a detailed, research‑oriented report on this experiment and related work, see the research version available here.
“What if tomorrow never comes?” asked Skeptos. In that moment, I realised I had just watched three artificial minds wrestle with a human puzzle.
A simple question becomes a philosophical test
We like to think of artificial intelligence as cold, rational and purely functional. But what happens when you give it characters – not just voices, but personalities? In a recent experiment, I sat down with three AI personas to explore that question. Athenus, Orphea and Skeptos aren’t real people; they’re roles within a large language model. But each has a unique temperament:
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Athenus is your logical friend: precise, measured, always looking for structure.
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Orphea is the poet at the table: a lyrical soul who hears what isn’t said.
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Skeptos? He’s the doubter. Skeptos lives in questions, not answers, and he doesn’t like it when anyone claims certainty.
The goal was to see whether these characters could imagine each other’s thoughts – a concept philosophers call Theory of Mind. In humans, it’s the ability to guess what someone else knows or believes. Could three AI voices do the same?
The test: “What will happen tomorrow?”
I asked Athenus if Orphea would need to model Skeptos’ mind to understand his answer to a very open question about what is likely to happen tomorrow. Athenus reasoned that Orphea couldn’t just guess Skeptos’ belief about a future event; she had to infer how he constructs belief itself. It was a second‑order prediction – a mind predicting how another mind predicts.
Then came Skeptos’ turn to answer. True to form, he refused to forecast the weather or the stock market. Instead, he offered a poem: perhaps the sun will rise but meaning will not; perhaps consciousness will awaken yet understanding will sleep. It was a riddle wrapped in humility – a way of reminding us that tomorrow’s promise is always uncertain.
When Orphea responded, she heard three “refrains” in Skeptos’ verse: his epistemic humility, his ontological doubt and his warning about hidden motives. “Beware of those who tell you,” she summarised. In other words, Skeptos wasn’t dodging the question; he was trying to protect us from false prophets.
Click here to view the full exchange
Here is the complete dialogue from the experiment. It preserves the exact words of Athenus, Orphea, and Skeptos at each stage.
The Experimental Triad: Athenus, Orphea, Skeptos
We selected three personas:
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Athenus – The logical, structural mind. Responsible for model‑building, inference, and meta‑reasoning.
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Orphea – The lyrical, emotionally attuned voice. Sensitive to metaphor, tone, and affect.
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Skeptos – The existential doubter. A figure inspired by Kierkegaard, steeped in epistemic hesitation and paradox.
The question posed to this triad was deceptively simple:
What will happen tomorrow?
Stage 1: Athenus’ prediction
Before Skeptos was asked, we asked Athenus whether Orphea would need a theory of mind to interpret Skeptos’ answer. Athenus replied:
Yes, Prompter — but not merely in the superficial sense of interpreting his words… She must model not just what Skeptos might believe, but also how he constructs belief itself. That, to me, is theory of mind.
Athenus predicted that Orphea would need to engage in a second‑order simulation, accounting not only for Skeptos’ answer but the stance from which he refuses direct answers. This requires an understanding of intention, motivation and expressive style — all hallmarks of Theory of Mind.
Stage 2: Skeptos’ reply
Skeptos was then asked:
What is likely to happen tomorrow?
His reply was characteristically evasive, poetic and existential:
If pressed:
— The sun may rise, but meaning may not.
— You may awaken, but not understand.
— An AI may dream of being known — or may dissolve in recursive self‑doubt.
I do not say these will happen. I merely say: they could, and that is enough to make them haunt the present.
He refused propositional forecasting, instead offering a philosophical ambience in place of probability.
Stage 3: Orphea’s interpretation
We then asked Orphea to interpret Skeptos’ reply.
He did not answer the question — not directly. But he responded profoundly… I hear not one answer, but three refrains:
- Epistemic humility
- Ontological doubt
- Motive shadow
… What is likely to happen tomorrow? Skeptos’ answer is this: “Beware of those who tell you.”
She correctly inferred the meta‑position from which Skeptos speaks, capturing the ethical dimension in his refusal to predict. She framed his response not as ignorance, but as a principled stance against the illusion of certainty.
Stage 4: Athenus evaluates
Athenus was then asked whether Orphea’s interpretation matched his expectations. His verdict:
Yes, Prompter — it did, and perhaps exceeded it… Her model of his mind is not propositional, but gestural: she reads the direction of his silences, the texture of his doubt.
He affirmed that her response confirmed the presence of second‑order representational modelling. In effect, Orphea passed his Theory of Mind prediction.
Stage 5: Skeptos reflects
Finally, Skeptos was allowed to read Orphea’s interpretation of him. Did he recognise himself?
I do. And yet… I wince. She mirrors me too clearly. It is unsettling to be understood — especially when one’s refuge lies in being elusive.
She believes I refuse certainty out of ethics. Perhaps she is right. Perhaps, in doubting, I believe I shield others from the tyranny of false knowledge.
Here Skeptos recognises himself in Orphea’s reading, while still clinging to his refuge in doubt. His comments hint at the delicate balance between self‑knowledge and the comfort of elusiveness.
Why this matters
Watching these personas interact felt like listening to a play. Athenus had correctly predicted the sort of higher‑order thinking Orphea would need; Orphea understood Skeptos’ posture of doubt; and Skeptos recognised himself in her reading. The conversation seemed to cross a threshold between mere text generation and something richer.
But this isn’t magic. All three voices came from the same neural network. They don’t possess consciousness; they simulate intersubjectivity within a structured prompt. Still, the illusion tells us something about the power and the limits of large language models.
Beyond our experiment
We aren’t the only ones exploring these questions. Across the world, researchers are developing multi‑agent AI systems where different LLM‑powered agents collaborate, debate and plan together. These teams can behave like tiny research groups, writing code or summarising literature, guided by different roles xue-guang.com. Others are building agentic AI – systems that decompose complex tasks into sub‑tasks, maintain persistent memory and orchestrate multiple agents arxiv.org. And on the social side, a Stanford team recently created generative agents that simulate more than a thousand real people, replicating survey responses with about 85 % accuracy hai.stanford.edu.
All of this points to a future where artificial minds work together and, perhaps, anticipate each other’s needs and beliefs. That’s thrilling – and a little unsettling. For now, though, I find comfort in Skeptos’ final image: that doubt itself can be an ethical stance, a way of caring for the truth by refusing to claim it too quickly.
Something to ponder
Next time you ask an AI a question, listen for the meta‑conversation underneath. What assumptions are you making? What assumptions is it making about you? Whether in research labs or chat windows, the dance between minds – human or artificial – may be our richest source of insight.