AIs now have personalities. Brands would be wise to take note.
In February, thousands of people grieved at a funeral for a chatbot, not because it had become less capable, but because it no longer felt like the same companion.
The chatbot was GPT-4o.
OpenAI swapped it for a smarter model last August, and backlash was so fierce, a Reddit post decrying the change hit 10,000 upvotes, that Sam Altman reversed the decision. When it was finally retired for good this February, the funeral above followed. Even with AI, people form relationships in remarkably human ways, and brands should take note.
AI models really do have personalities
It turns out large language models have distinct, measurable personalities reflecting the cultures that built them: ChatGPT is gregarious and accommodating; Claude is careful and structured; Gemini is clipped and certain. By accident, the labs have proven what brands should know: when people treat a product as a partner rather than a tool, what matters most is what it is, not just what it can do.
Comms has always known this
Journalists don't interview logos, they interview people with perspective, and audiences don't fall for logos either, they fall for personalities and communities. It’s the same on social: content only lands when it feels human, when it’s emotional, not when it’s a logo broadcasting at people. Look at Nike and Adidas: Nike's World Cup campaign borrows celebrity culture, Adidas stays rooted in the game and its subculture. Adidas has climbed from 16th to 2nd in this year's global reputation rankings while Nike dropped from 21st to 50th; as the research put it, Adidas is about "we", Nike is about "me."
Nobody mourned GPT-4o for how it wrote, they mourned who it felt like. Tone is expression; character is identity, and it's what most brands never define beyond a forgotten tone-of-voice PDF. Anthropic, by contrast, embeds a "Constitution" into Claude to define its character, and tracks what it calls "character drift" over time. That's rigorous work for what most brands treat as an afterthought.
The risk of borrowing someone else's character
Build your own tools on top of these models, though, and their character bleeds into your output. Draft everything from the same models unshaped, and brands converge on the same optimism, the same agreeableness. These models are also flatterers by nature, so never let one choose what you publish. That’s exactly the gap our Cultural Playbook is built to close, giving clients a defined character and point of view to draft from, so every campaign stays true to one cultural identity from beginning to end.
The lesson from the funeral
People fall for character, not capability.
Competence is easy to replicate; character is the last defensible moat. A product tells people what you do, a personality gives them someone to love.
Written by: Brittney Bean, AI expert and founder of Diaspar AI
Photo: @zzoeykimm