The Great Pretender
"Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act" - Leonard Cohen
These days when dealing with AI, there is a high likelihood of invoking a persona. The persona can be a member of one's target audience. In the case of the persona below, it is the AI's suggested travel companion for me during role-playing games - Emily, a 28-year-old literature professor. The AI assumes the persona. The character maintains this stable persona throughout the entire game.
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Although I and perhaps many role-playing game enthusiasts are fine interacting with an AI-generated persona, the idea of humans assuming personas is perhaps less universally accepted. Humans are supposed to be "authentic." Maybe this is a residual sentiment from a time when people favoured natural materials - such as cotton, silk, and leather - over artificial materials such as polyester and vinyl. It is difficult to say. I am just speculating.
I do want to mention however that some people believe "acting" is a way of overcoming personality deficits. For example, if a person is quite angry all the time, they may wish to practice being at peace. I endured strong emotions through my teenage years and early adult life. It is of course possible to rationalize or create reasons for one's feelings. But in some cases, perhaps the feelings are simply "there." Practicing a persona is about habitually invoking it.
It is an interesting concept, if one wishes to become a loving husband, to practice being one. Of course, one should ideally desire for the transformation to occur. For those suffering from anxiety, I leave it to them to decide if they can initially "pretend to be brave." The opposite is true, too. I can pretend to have anxieties. If I get quite good at it, I might forget to toggle off the persona.
I was doing a paper on youth gang members. I was fascinated by the ability some of them had to toggle on and off fairly violent personas. This led me to believe that having a persona is sometimes an adaptive response to help the individual survive problematic situations. What is true in hostile neighbourhoods may also be the case in workplaces. A person can introduce a persona to help them interact with coworkers.