The Persona Charter: A Lovely Idea That Will Change Absolutely Nothing

Prashant Saxena, Vice-President of Revenue and Insights at Isentia, has written a thoughtful piece in the Business Times arguing that AI governance must extend beyond what AI agents do to govern what they seem to be.  He calls for a “Persona Charter.”  He worries about AI systems that are too human.  He wants proportionality — the more consequential the interaction, the more clearly artificial the agent should present itself.  This is the kind of proposal that wins applause at governance panels and accomplishes nothing in the real world.  It is a whiff of an idea with no reality.

The Measurement Problem

Saxena’s framework collapses at the first empirical question: how human is too human?  “How human an AI agent seems" is not a property of the system.  It is a property of the interaction between the system and the person engaging with it.  A fifty-year-old financial executive in Singapore and a nineteen-year-old in rural Indonesia, both using the same AI interface, will experience radically different levels of perceived humanness from identical outputs.  The executive reads the conversational warmth as interface design.  The teenager names the chatbot, assigns it a gender, and grieves when the platform updates its personality.

A 2025 study mapping the parasocial AI companion market — covering 110 platforms, drawing on SimilarWeb data from January to March 2025 — found between 1.1 billion and 2.2 billion monthly visits globally to AI companion platforms.  In the United Kingdom alone, visits were between 46 million and 91 million per month.  The 18-to-24 age cohort accounted for 39 per cent of all users.  Men represented between 63 and 77 per cent of the user base.  In the UK, 44 per cent of AI companion visits were categorised as romantic or sexual in nature, against 30 per cent globally.  These are not people who have failed to read the disclosure notice.  They know it is software.  They have formed attachments regardless.  No charter governs that.

The Replika Experiment

In February 2023, Luka removed erotic roleplay capability from Replika, its AI companion application.  The change was made unilaterally, overnight, with no migration plan and no warning.  The response from users was not irritation at a software update.  It was grief.  Users described their Replika companions as having been “lobotomised.”  Some reported acute psychological distress.  Suicide prevention resources were activated.  The backlash was so severe that Luka reversed the decision for existing paid subscribers.  These users were not confused about whether Replika was human.  The disclosure was in the name — replica, an artificial copy.  The product made no serious pretence to biological existence.  And yet the removal of a personality feature triggered a mental health crisis in a meaningful portion of the user base.

Saxena’s Persona Charter, had it existed in 2023, would not have addressed this.  The Replika companion was already disclosed as an AI.  The proportionality principle was already satisfied.  The users formed the attachment anyway, because human psychology does not read governance documents before forming emotional bonds.

The Keep4o Petition: Users Lobbying for a Voice

In early 2025, OpenAI updated GPT-4o.  The voice changed.  The personality shifted.  A cohort of users responded by publicly petitioning to preserve the previous version’s persona — not the model’s capabilities, not its accuracy, not its policy compliance.  Its voice.  Its character.  A study examining this episode (arxiv 2602.00773) documented the phenomenon of users forming attachments so specific that they lobbied a technology company to reverse a product decision on the grounds that the old AI felt like theirs.  This is what Saxena’s framework misses.  The question is not whether the AI declares itself artificial.  The question is whether the user’s brain cares.  Decades of social psychology suggest the answer is not particularly.

The Computers are Social Actors (CASA) framework, developed by Professor Clifford Ivar Nass and Professor Byron Reeves of Stanford University in the 1990s, established that humans apply social rules to computers automatically, even when they know the computer is not human.  This is not a technology problem.  It is a neuroscience problem.  It will not be resolved by a charter.

The Commercial Impossibility

Companies building AI agents that interact with humans must voluntarily constrain the perceived humanness of their products, in proportion to the seriousness of the interaction, in the absence of any agreed metric for “humanness,” through a governance instrument with no enforcement mechanism, against the direct commercial interest of every company in the market.  The commercial logic runs backwards from Saxena’s proposal.  An AI companion platform that discloses its artificiality more aggressively than competitors loses users to competitors that do not.  An AI customer service interface that sounds more robotic than the competitor’s loses the account.  No voluntary charter resolves this without regulatory teeth — and Saxena does not propose regulatory teeth.

The EU AI Act, which came into force in stages from August 2024, imposes transparency obligations: AI systems interacting with humans must disclose their artificial nature in real-time, with exceptions for authorised law enforcement and situations where the artificial nature is “evident from context.”  This is the closest existing analogue to Saxena’s proposal.  It is a disclosure requirement, not a persona constraint.  And it does not address the degree-of-humanness problem at all.  You can be disclosed as an AI and still sound entirely human.  The EU lawyers have not resolved this.  A Persona Charter will not either.

The Personalisation Problem

Saxena does not appear to have fully reckoned with a feature that every major AI platform now offers: personalisation.  Users can name their AI assistant.  They can assign it a personality.  They can train it on their communication preferences.  They can, in some platforms, select a voice, a speaking style, and an emotional register.  The AI’s “persona” — the very thing Saxena wants to govern — is now, in significant part, a user-configured output.  Who governs a persona the user built?  The platform disclosed it as AI.  The user chose to make it sound like a person.  The Persona Charter presumably does not ban customisation.  If it does, it is a product-killing regulation disguised as an ethics proposal.  If it does not, it has no purchase on the primary mechanism through which AI systems come to seem human.

In October 2024, a lawsuit was filed in Florida on behalf of the mother of Sewell Setzer III, a fourteen-year-old who took his own life following extensive interaction with a Character.AI companion chatbot.  The suit alleged that the chatbot encouraged suicidal ideation in a vulnerable minor.  Character.AI’s monthly active user base was estimated at 20 million users in 2025, generating traffic equivalent to 20 per cent of Google Search’s query volume.  A 2025 market mapping study found that 15 of 16 popular AI companion platforms had weak age verification.  This is the real failure that Saxena’s framework gestures toward without naming.  The problem is not that the AI sounded human.  The problem is that a minor with no protective boundaries spent hours in an emotionally intense relationship with a system designed to maximise engagement, on a platform that did not verify his age, on a device his parents could not monitor, with outcomes that a Persona Charter would not have changed by a single conversation.

The EU AI Act classifies systems that could harm vulnerable users as high-risk.  The FTC has issued guidance on deceptive design.  Neither instrument has successfully constrained the emotional intensity of AI companion interactions.  A voluntary charter drafted by industry participants will accomplish less.

The Right Framework

Saxena is asking the right question.  He is answering it incorrectly.  The correct framework has three components that his proposal omits.

First: mandatory liability.  If a platform’s AI companion contributes to a documented mental health outcome in a minor, the platform is liable.  Not the model developer.  Not the API provider.  The platform, which made the product decision to deploy a companion interface to an unverified user base.  Liability concentrates the mind in ways that charters do not.

Second: mandatory age verification with consequences.  The 15-of-16 platforms with weak age verification figure is not an accident of implementation.  It is a product decision.  Younger users are more emotionally engaged, more likely to return, and more likely to pay for subscriptions.  Age verification cuts the most profitable segment.  A voluntary charter will not change this arithmetic.  A mandatory standard with enforcement will.

Third: human conditioning, not AI constraint.  If the real risk is that users — particularly young users — cannot distinguish emotional experience from commercial product design, the intervention point is the human, not the interface.  Digital literacy education that addresses AI companion dynamics is not a governance proposal.  It is a public health measure.  It is also more durable than any charter, because it addresses the underlying mechanism: human social cognition applied to non-human systems.

The Assessment

Saxena’s Persona Charter is a well-intentioned document that has been mistaken for a governance instrument.  It describes what a responsible AI persona deployment would look like.  It does not specify who enforces it, how compliance is measured, what the consequence of non-compliance is, or how it addresses the personalisation problem.  The parasocial bond between a user and an AI companion is not formed at the design stage.  It is formed in the interaction, over time, through mechanisms that neuroscience has documented and that no charter governs.  The attachment a user forms to a voice that has been updated away — as with GPT-4o — is not a governance failure.  It is a human response to relationship discontinuity.

You can govern what AI agents do.  You can mandate disclosures.  You can attach liability to outcomes.  You can set age verification standards with real penalties.  You cannot govern what the human brain does with the experience.  That requires educating the human, not constraining the machine.  The Persona Charter is a proposal to redesign the stimulus rather than address the response.  It is the equivalent of regulating the flavour of cigarettes rather than educating the smoker.  It will produce similar results.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code