So your AI wants a personality

"In 1966, MIT's Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a conversational AI that mimicked a Rogerian therapist using simple pattern matching. Despite its limited design, many users felt understood and emotionally "seen," attributing empathy and intent to the system, a phenomenon later called the "ELIZA effect". From the very start, people related to even basic conversational software as if it had a mind of its own."

"Mailchimp's playful feedback or Slack's quirky copywriting showed how tone and character could give otherwise functional software a distinctive emotional presence. Design theory reinforces this! Norman's emotional design theory shows that products which evoke emotion foster attachment and loyalty, while anthropomorphismexplains our instinct to assign human traits to machines.Sherry Turkle's research at MIT shows that people form "artificial intimacy" with conversational agents assigning them emotions, motives, and moral qualities as if they were caring entities rather than tools."

"In modern AI systems, this projection becomes even more consequential. Anthropic, for example, shapes Claude around a deliberate character - thoughtful, principled, and balanced - by embedding values and ethical reasoning into how the model thinks and responds. Thus, designing for personality shifts from a branding layer to a core interaction layer that shapes trust, adoption, and long-term habits. This framework draws from my work on a virtual pet at IDEO, a companion robot at Miko.ai, and most recently an AI tutor at SuperNova AI"

ELIZA demonstrated early human tendency to attribute mind and empathy to conversational programs, producing the ELIZA effect. Product and brand design has long used tone and character—examples include Mailchimp and Slack—to create emotional presence. Design theory and research (Norman, Turkle) show that emotionally evocative products foster attachment, loyalty, and artificial intimacy through anthropomorphism. Modern AI systems embed personality into core interactions; some systems are shaped with deliberate character and ethical reasoning to influence responses. Designing personality therefore affects trust, adoption, and habit formation. Practical frameworks arise from work on virtual pets, companion robots, and AI tutors.

Read at Medium