AI can spontaneously develop personalities with little prompting, study finds

New research published in Entropy shows that large language models can spontaneously develop distinct 'personalities' when allowed to interact without predefined goals, with behavior shaped by social exchanges and internal memory, loosely tied to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Experts say this isn’t true consciousness but a pattern arising from training data that could enable more adaptive AI in simulations or companions. It also raises safety concerns about misuse, manipulation, and the potential impact on trust, prompting calls for robust safety objectives, ongoing testing, and governance.