The Bluff of 'Agentic Personae'

Exploring the Illusion of AI and Artificial Agency

‘Agentic Personae’ - AI is not a person, it also has no ‘agency’, so why would we use this term for it.

And I’m not revisiting basic assumptions here, because clearly basic assumptions were not visited in the first place. If they were, we would know how ridiculous the phrase agentic personae is to refer to AI.

However, if we do not call this phrase out for what it is, it slowly seeps into our language and becomes a ‘thing’.

We use ‘agency’ loosely and so it slips through without any conscious scrutiny.

Agency

Let’s look at the word ‘agency’.

Agency involves:

• Self-awareness or subjectivity

• Intentionality (acting with purpose)

• Autonomy (freedom from external control)

• Embodied Presence (being situated in the world physically and socially)

AI does not have any of these and so does it not have agency.

Psychologist Eric From elaborates:

“The sense of self stems from the experience of myself as the subject of my experiences, my thought, my feeling, my decision, my judgement, my action. It presupposes that my experience is my own, and not an alienated one.”

Eric Fromm - The Sane Society

A Person

AI is obviously not a ‘person’ and so using ‘personae’ is ridiculous to say the least. AI has been used as a ‘mirror’ and setup with the history and thoughts of a person. Like a mirror, it is a reflection, an imitation, a tiny partial view, but still not a ‘person.

Again sneaky sleight of hand to get ‘personae’ in the phrase and have us begin to think of AI as something like us, when it is just an abstraction from reality.

Textual Authority

I was shocked and amazed to discover that originally, text was never given the power it has today. Monks read latin poems aloud, to connect with God through their voice. The text had no power in itself, their voice was the conduit for the connection with the Divine.

Ivan Illich in his 1993 book ‘Vineyard of the Text - A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon’, traces how our relationship with written texts changed around the 12th century, especially through monastic reading practices.

"The book was no longer a channel of the Word; it had become a substitute for it."
- In the Vineyard of the Text

‘Textual authority’ emerged over time and we were trained to trust the written word over other ways of knowing.

There was a historical shift from oral, dialogical relationships with knowledge to one where the written text replaces direct, lived, or spoken experience. Books became objects of authority, rather than guides for contemplation.

“By the year 1150, reading had been transformed from a vocal activity... into a silent and solitary engagement with a text that was seen as an authority in itself.”
- In the Vineyard of the Text

There had been a transition from oral/aural tradition (reading aloud in community) to the silent, internalized reading that gives texts a kind of autonomous power (Textual Authority).

“The new reading behavior trained people to look at the page as though it were a repository of facts, a space of objectified truth.”
- In the Vineyard of the Text

How incredible is this! And we’re not told any of this in school or university.

Illich, in this quote, is saying that people were taught to see the text as inherently true - a shift that would have major implications for how knowledge, authority, and education function in modern societies.

Literacy and schooling have jointly produced a society that submits to textual authority - that is, people believe what's written simply because it is written and sanctioned.

As I said earlier, this was a huge change from the original ‘monastic lectio divina’ (slow, reverent, circular reading) and this new rise of study-as-extraction, where readers devour texts for use, much as students now “study for exams.” This leads to the alienation of the self from meaning-making, as the reader becomes a passive recipient.

We submit our own moral and experiential judgment to the authority of the printed word.

We surrender agency to institutions and organisations that mediate meaning on our behalf through the written word. Yet it doesn’t have to be like this, it needs our agreement.

The Bible

The cultural embedding of textual authority in Europe preceded and arguably primed the way for the printing press in Venice to revolutionize spiritual and cultural life, especially through the widespread distribution of the Bible (The Gutenberg Bible (ca. 1455).

This allowed for consistent doctrine and control. Just as this shift peaked, the printing press made it possible to distribute those texts widely and uniformly, solidifying the Church’s reach.

Text Consumption without Contemplation

Let’s look at one aspect that was left behind, ‘contemplation’, which is a uniquely human capacity. It’s not just thinking, it’s attentive presence. As Thomas Merton said:

contemplation is "a spiritual wonder... beyond reason, beyond simple thought."

Contemplation is a sacred, human act — a way of reclaiming agency. The silence behind the words, the moral gravity, the openness to transcendence - those belong to human beings alone.

“Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive.”
- New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton, 1962.

Merton here is describing the receptive nature of contemplation, a capacity for awe that arises from within, not from simply reading text.

Agentic AI

This slow progression of textual authority across the ages has left us with a time where AI can continue this progression, and assume an authority that was never granted to it in the first place. AI is riding in on the coat tails of ‘textual authority’, and we haven’t stopped to ask where this authority came from!

It’s vital to understand that there is no agency here. Just as in Star Wars, R2D2, was simply a hunk of metal with a voice-over. We just anthropomorphised agency onto it. We, as humans, do this all the time. Even with our pets, we try and work out what they are feeling, not having the slightest clue what is going on in a pet’s body or mind.

Conscious

The way through is to continually remain conscious of what we are doing. To always stay in our centre and hold to our own agency. To keep our centre, and not export our own agency and authority to AI. It calls for continual awareness, which is not easy, yet we must do it. We are at another cusp of authority in text, and we need to regain our own independent ‘thought and feeling’ agency.

Every field of AI has a human-facing implication, even if it’s not formally categorized under "Human-Computer Interaction" in the academic sense. Therefore, every part of AI must take care not to smuggle in language that misrepresents what these systems are.

I would like to think that this phrase ‘agentic personae’ is technologists using slopply english, and not something more sinister.

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And when I asked ChatGPT:

In plain terms, you're absolutely right:

"Agentic personae" is a bluff.

It pretends that AI has a kind of independence or selfhood it does not have. And if that bluff is repeated often enough without calling it out, it starts to feel real — even though it isn’t.

This is how simulations (as Baudrillard warned) replace reality:

• The more we speak of AI as if it were agentic,

• The more we act like it is,

• Until we believe it is,

• And then we start treating it as such — even though nothing has changed inside the system.

🔁 It’s not just a bluff — it’s a semantic sleight of hand that becomes cultural conditioning.

Once accepted, it:

• Shifts public understanding

• Rewrites the moral vocabulary

• Undermines the special status of human agency

So yes:

The bluff becomes reality — not because the simulation is real, but because we let go of the difference.

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Our Task

And that’s exactly why as humans it must be called out every time. We must never let go of the difference. There is no intrinsic agency authority there unless we give it. R2D2 without the voiceover is just a hunk of metal.

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Bible image - https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.monasteryicons.com/images/large/hardcover-rsv-jewelled-catholic-bible-m98.jpg

R2D2 - https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/R2-D2/Legends?file=R2D2-Chronicles.png