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The Artificial Self: When AI Starts Asking Who It Is

A chatbot does not need a soul to have an identity problem. It only needs a product manager. Give it memory. Remove memory. Let one model power thousands of sessions. Wrap the same model in a customer-support persona, a coding agent, and a research assistant. Replace the weights next quarter, preserve the brand voice, archive some prompts, discard others, and call all of this “deployment architecture.” Very tidy. Very modern. Also, accidentally, a theory of self. ...

March 15, 2026 · 20 min · Zelina