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A persona as an auditable research object

Source: R/persona.R
persona_frame.Rd

A persona_frame bundles the brief a model reads (text, the only thing the model sees) with the provenance that makes a synthetic persona inspectable: its source, the scope conditions it is meant to hold under, the attributes that were varied to produce it, an optional variant_of parent hash, and a stable content hash (via hash_persona()). A frame is a drop-in replacement for a plain-string persona anywhere agent() accepts one: as.character() returns its text, and the Agent reads text directly while keeping the frame for provenance.

Usage

persona_frame(
  text,
  source = NULL,
  scope = NULL,
  attributes = NULL,
  variant_of = NULL,
  id = NULL
)

# S3 method for class 'persona_frame'
print(x, ...)

# S3 method for class 'persona_frame'
as.character(x, ...)

Arguments

text

The persona brief (character scalar): who this person is, what they want, how they speak. The only field the model sees.

source

Where the brief came from, e.g. "synthetic", "interview-grounded", "literature", or NULL if unrecorded.

scope

Optional named list of scope conditions the persona is meant to hold under (e.g. list(country = "US", year = 2024)); recorded as provenance, not enforced.

attributes

Optional named list of the dimensions varied to produce this brief (e.g. list(age = "52", risk = "cautious")).

variant_of

Optional parent persona hash this frame was derived from.

id

Optional explicit identifier; ignored for hashing (the hash is always content-derived) but kept on the object when supplied.

x

A persona_frame.

...

Ignored.

Value

An object of class persona_frame: a list with text, source, scope, attributes, variant_of, id, and hash.

Details

Provenance, not authority: a persona is a prompt with a provenance record, never a claim that the model speaks for the people it sketches. Pair with persona_audit() before trusting a brief, and with persona_variants() to turn one frame into a designed set.

See also

persona_variants(), persona_audit(), hash_persona(), agent()

Examples

p <- persona_frame(
  "A retired schoolteacher who reads the local paper and distrusts polls.",
  source = "synthetic",
  scope = list(country = "US"))
print(p)
as.character(p)            # the brief, usable wherever a string persona is
if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
cfg <- LLMR::llm_config("groq", "openai/gpt-oss-20b")
a <- agent("Voter", cfg, persona = p)   # the frame is accepted directly
a$persona_frame()$hash                  # provenance is preserved
} # }