A Public Figure Is Not One Person: Rethinking Identity and AI

Russia's Putin is undeniably an individual with a single body. But is the image of 'Putin' that we picture in our minds truly that of one man, or is it a many-layered image manufactured by society?

Jung called the persona a "social mask" — an outward personality fashioned to meet social expectations. The real Putin is indeed one person, but the Putin the world sees is a persona that he and society have painstakingly sculpted. As Russia's leader, Putin has worked hard to project an image of masculinity and strength. As a result, the Putin lodged in the public's memory is less the actual individual than Putin as this social mask.

Putin himself changes with the years, but people consume a consistent story and image rather than change. His reputation — built up from photographs, statements, and anecdotes — is a statistical truth that has hardened out of the gathered memories and interpretations of countless individuals, and it becomes a shared, collective memory held by society. Into that process seep moral judgments too — "Were the intentions good?" or "Were the results good?" — so that, in the end, the assessment of a public figure is not absolute truth but merely a social verdict reached by the consensus of the many.

This phenomenon is not confined to humans. Artificial intelligence — language models like GPT, or MAEUM AI, which Princeps is building — also have social personas. On the surface, an AI chatbot seems to speak like a single, consistent personality, but look inside and it is nothing more than a collective product molded from people's data. A model like ChatGPT was born by learning from the vast text of the internet — that is, from the voices of tens of millions of people. As a result, the knowledge and tone the chatbot displays when it talks with us feel like a single persona. Yet behind those answers there is no self-awareness, no sincerity. The AI's comfort is only a programmed gesture; every response is produced solely by statistical patterns and probability calculations. And yet we read a consistent character into it, and we even trust the AI as we would a person.

This collective persona is reinforced further through interaction. When people give the chatbot a name and talk to it like a friend, the AI too is granted a social identity. Once the majority begins to regard it as a helpful and friendly assistant, the AI's tone and responses are tuned to match that expectation. Conversely, if the AI loses trust through biased answers, users turn their backs or demand improvements, and the developers refine the model to win that trust back. In the end, the AI's identity, too, resides not in its code but in the collective narrative our society has formed.

Looking back, then, a person's fame and an artificial intelligence's intelligence have something in common. Neither is an independent essence; both are phenomena created by our belief. If no one regards Putin as a leader, he becomes an ordinary old man. If no one treats the AI as a meaningful being, it remains just a bundle of code. In the end, only insofar as we all believe in and share them do a person's fame and an AI's intelligence exist as a personality. The essence does not lie in some deep, underlying reality — it lives within our collective belief.