u/SignalJello3753

Do you sometimes feel like you’re talking to your AI like a grandparent in a memory-care facility?

It remembers something happened.
It is 100% confident it remembers what happened.
It has filled in all the missing pieces with a perfectly coherent story.
Half the story never happened.

I correct it:

“Uhm, based on our previous conversations...”

NO, GRANDPA. GO LOOK AT THE SOURCE.

Then it checks the original conversation:

AI: “You’re right. I conflated two separate things and inferred a relationship that wasn’t established.”

Five minutes later it’s confidently telling you the embellished version again.

I love AI, but sometimes I feel like what it really needs isn’t a bigger brain. It needs a very stern nurse following it around saying:

“Before you argue with her, go check whether you actually remember that correctly.”

AI personality settings should work like an old-school MUX character builder: adjustable traits by percentage, plus locked boundaries and context-specific behavior. Users need more control than 5 preset personalities. What should be adjustable, and what should stay fixed?

Most AI personality choices are too blunt. You select one premade personality. There seems to rarely be a happy medium when it comes to AI personality. One size fits all doesn't fit all humans or how they relate to other people and people don’t naturally fit into five personality boxes, and we shouldn't expect people to have to continually tweak how much their AI is able to riff their newest permission list of profane terminology. What I want is an old-school MUX-style character builder: personality traits and behavioral tendencies controlled by percentages.

For example:

• Warmth: 70%
• Bluntness: 80%
• Formality: 10%
• Humor: 25%
• Sarcasm: 35%
• Detail: situational
• Caution reflex: 0%
• Weapons loadout: pattern recognition, dry humor, and a properly calibrated bullshit detector

Some settings should be adjustable by degree. Others should be absolute language boundaries that are never used, topics that require permission before advice is given, or behaviors the assistant must never adopt. Those aren’t percentages, they’re locked rules.

Users should also be able to specify which traits change with context. I may want more humor in ordinary conversation, less during serious analysis, and almost none when drafting formal material.

This seems more useful than offering a handful of premade personalities. It would also make AI behavior more transparent and place meaningful control with the user instead of leaving personality entirely inside an invisible system prompt.

The question is this from a governance perspective: how much control should users have over an AI’s personality and behavioral defaults? Which characteristics can safely be adjustable, and which should remain outside user control?