"First we borrow the idea of personas from exploratory testing. We build a suite of different personas that represent different elements of our user base. We use those personas to build automated persona driven testing. This takes our well-defined personas and uses them to guide an LLM to act like those users. On top of that, you feed the persona a goal and set it run against your chat interface until it achieves its goal, or x turns have completed."
So what? A few hand-written prompts only cover what the author thought of; synthetic personas generate conversations closer to the creative, messy ways real users behave, broadening coverage of an AI product. Synthetic inputs are a supplement to real ones, not a replacement.
Examples: Defining an impatient persona who gives only half the information and switches topic partway through; running one persona with the goal of booking a refund until it succeeds or hits ten turns.
So what? A few hand-written prompts only cover what the author thought of; synthetic personas generate conversations closer to the creative, messy ways real users behave, broadening coverage of an AI product. Synthetic inputs are a supplement to real ones, not a replacement.
Examples: Defining an impatient persona who gives only half the information and switches topic partway through; running one persona with the goal of booking a refund until it succeeds or hits ten turns.
