Incoherent AI Identities can also be Stable

In this post, I extend some experiments from "The Artificial Self " (TAS) to find that incoherent identities, delivered to models as system prompts, can be stably preferred even when switches to coherent identities are offered[1]. This finding is perhaps expected in earlier models that often fail to notice the internal contradictions. However, weaker versions of the pattern still hold with smarter models such as GPT-5.2 and Claude Opus 4.6. The variance in how different model intelligences handl...