"When AI Writes Personas": Analyzing Lexical Diversity in LLM-Generated Persona Descriptions

Sankalp Sethi*, Joni Salminen, Danial Amin, Bernard J. Jansen

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in generating user personas representing various groups of people. It is vital that these personas do not contain major sources of bias for stakeholders using the personas. To investigate linguistic bias in LLM-generated personas, we apply eleven lexical diversity metrics to analyze the association between linguistic diversity in 600 persona descriptions generated using five LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Llama) and demographic attributes (age, gender, country) of the personas. We find that LLM-generated persona descriptions are lexically diverse independently of the personas’ demographic attributes. While we find no significant demographic bias in the persona profiles, we do find significant differences between the lexical diversity of persona descriptions generated by the LLMs. The persona descriptions generated by Gemini 1.5 Pro have the highest lexical diversity. The results imply that current LLMs can generate lexically diverse persona descriptions, but the selection of an LLM for specific applications is an important decision.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationExtended Abstracts Of The 2025 Chi Conference On Human Factors In Computing Systems, Chi 2025
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9798400713958
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Apr 2025
Event2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA 2025 - Yokohama, Japan
Duration: 26 Apr 20251 May 2025

Publication series

NameConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Conference

Conference2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA 2025
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityYokohama
Period26/04/251/05/25

Keywords

  • Ai
  • Evaluation
  • LLMs
  • Lexical diversity
  • User personas

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