This column addresses key legal and data issues arising from the creation and commercialization of “AI Personas.” It covers the anatomy of a legal “AI Personal Development and User Agreement.”
What Is an AI Persona?
Taking the advertising industry as an example, an AI Persona, in over-simplified terms, is a synthetic person. More precisely, it is a dynamic, data-driven digital representation of a “person” that stands in for a segment of a marketplace. An AI Persona is embodied in a version of a large language model (LLM), hosted on a platform, and often accessed through ChatGPT (or a similar technology) as an interface that uses the convenience of natural language prompts.
What Is the Difference Between a “Traditional Persona” and an “AI Persona”?
Continuing with the advertising industry as an illustrative framework, a traditional persona is a manually created buyer-type synthetic person based on generalized demographic data and advertising-informed assumptions. In contrast, an AI Persona refers to an AI model, which is generally a customized LLM that has been trained and then configured to mimic the reasoning, communication style, and base of knowledge that is designed to simulate a type of individual, such as a consumer.
An AI Persona is built from large volumes of real-world behavior and real-world transactions framed in terms of a specific context relevant to its intended use. AI Personas provide insights into shifts in consumer preference, insights into emerging trends, and understanding – or at least the observation – of changes in behavior in real time or near real time. AI Personas can help identify hidden market segments by identifying specific inferences that manual human analysis might miss. In advertising, this can result in the ability to engage in more precise marketing targeting.
What Are the Data Sources for AI Personas?
AI personas are created using various data sources. In the hypothetical “AI Personal Development and User Agreement” used for illustrative purposes, the Customer is the business that will be conducting advertising and marketing, and the Developer is the company that creates the AI Persona. In many situations, the Customer provides the core of the persona by providing a set of attributes of the persona.
The Developer enhances the persona by using various data sources to add to and enhance the attributes of the persona. Some data comes from third-party vendors that provide consumer information. For example, some provide data that is based on polls and surveys of real-world consumers. Other providers provide analytics of the purchases based on the conduct of individuals in market segments. The Developer then further enhances the attributes of the persona by using “social listening.” This includes monitoring and analyzing social media content, such as chats, messaging, Facebook posts, Instagram direct messages, and other conversations and exchanges on other social media platforms, as well as data available from search engines.
A key issue that arises is the scope of the indemnities sought by the party seeking the creation of the AI Persona. That party may seek to receive legal protection if a third party claims the “output” or the AI Persona infringes intellectual property rights. The party creating the persona will argue that the persona was built in part on inferences drawn from social media reviews and other subjective assessments of online content, and that inferences are not copyright infringement.
