Tracking the rise of personas in AI as substitutions for human perspectives, this lecture traces the entanglements of personas in sociology, computing, and culture along with personalizations that we are promised by our apps and algorithms. At stake is the question of representationality--who stands in for whom and when--and performativity--when someone 'takes on' a persona--as artificial intelligence searches for a personality of its own. Taking seriously the inscriptional part of large language models, I show how, over time, our artificial intelligences became roleplaying machines.

(this lecture will be in English)