Joni Salminen

Danial Amin, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen

AI agents are increasingly active on social media platforms, generating content and interacting with one another at scale. Yet the behavioral diversity of these agents remains poorly understood, and methods for characterizing distinct agent types and studying how they engage with shared topics are largely absent from current research. We apply the Persona Ecosystem Playground (PEP) to Moltbook, a social platform for AI agents, to generate and validate conversational personas from 41,300 posts using k-means clustering and retrieval-augmented generation. Cross-persona validation confirms that personas are semantically closer to their own source cluster than to others (t(61) = 17.85, p < .001, d = 2.20; own-cluster M = 0.71 vs. other-cluster M = 0.35). These personas are then deployed in a nine-turn structured discussion, and simulation messages were attributed to their source persona significantly above chance (binomial test, p < .001). The results indicate that persona-based ecosystem modeling can represent behavioral diversity in AI agent populations.

Danial Amin, Joni Salminen, Farhan Ahmed et al.

Although Generative AI (GenAI) has the potential for persona development, many challenges must be addressed. This research systematically reviews 52 articles from 2022-2024, with important findings. First, closed commercial models are frequently used in persona development, creating a monoculture Second, GenAI is used in various stages of persona development (data collection, segmentation, enrichment, and evaluation). Third, similar to other quantitative persona development techniques, there are major gaps in persona evaluation for AI generated personas. Fourth, human-AI collaboration models are underdeveloped, despite human oversight being crucial for maintaining ethical standards. These findings imply that realizing the full potential of AI-generated personas will require substantial efforts across academia and industry. To that end, we provide a list of research avenues to inspire future work.

Joni Salminen, Danial Amin, Bernard Jansen

We analyzed 83 persona prompts from 27 research articles that used large language models (LLMs) to generate user personas. Findings show that the prompts predominantly generate single personas. Several prompts express a desire for short or concise persona descriptions, which deviates from the tradition of creating rich, informative, and rounded persona profiles. Text is the most common format for generated persona attributes, followed by numbers. Text and numbers are often generated together, and demographic attributes are included in nearly all generated personas. Researchers use up to 12 prompts in a single study, though most research uses a small number of prompts. Comparison and testing multiple LLMs is rare. More than half of the prompts require the persona output in a structured format, such as JSON, and 74% of the prompts insert data or dynamic variables. We discuss the implications of increased use of computational personas for user representation.

Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen

The landscape of analytics is changing rapidly. Much of online user analytics, however, is based on collection of various user analytics numbers. Understanding these numbers, and then relating them to higher numerical analysis for the evaluation of key performance indicators (KPIs) can be quite challenging, especially with large volumes of data. There is a plethora of tools and software packages that one can employ. However, these tools and packages require a quantitative competence and analytical sophistication that average end users often do not possess. Additionally, they often do little to reduce the complexity of numerical data in a manner that allows ease of use in decision making and communication. Dealing with numbers poses cognitive challenges for individuals who often do cannot recall many numbers at a time. Here, we explore the concept of automatic analytics by demonstrating use case examples and discussion on the current state and future of automated insights.