English

Same Voice, Different Lab: On the Homogenization of Frontier LLM Personalities

Human-Computer Interaction 2026-05-06 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

LLM assistant personalities play a critical role in user experience and perceived response quality. We present a large-scale experiment of frontier LLM personalities using external ELO-based traits scoring across 144 traits. We find that all models tested converge on a form of trait expression that is systematic, methodical, and analytical and suppress traits such as remorseful and sycophantic. Moreover, models tend to diverge more in their expression of ``middle-of-distribution traits`` such as poetic or playful, but even these so-called ``creative`` models tend to have more neutral identities. These similarities suggest an implicit emergence of a standard of optimal assistant behavior. In a landscape of varied training methods, character training, therefore, stands out for its uniformity, offering insight into a tacit consensus between model developers.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.02897,
  title  = {Same Voice, Different Lab: On the Homogenization of Frontier LLM Personalities},
  author = {Avinash Krishna and Kalyana Chadalavada and Unso Eun Seo Jo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.02897},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Submitted to ACL 2026. 7 Pages, 8 figures