# Twenty Years of Personality Computing: Threats, Challenges and Future Directions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02082 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02082/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 314 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02547/) (2023)
- [InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17976/) (2023)
- [BIG5-CHAT: Shaping LLM Personalities Through Training on Human-Grounded Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16491/) (2024)
- [PANDORA Talks: Personality and Demographics on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04460/) (2020)
- [Recent Trends in Deep Learning Based Personality Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03628/) (2019)
- [Systematic Evaluation of GPT-3 for Zero-Shot Personality Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01183/) (2023)
- [Building Better AI Agents: A Provocation on the Utilisation of Persona in LLM-based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11977/) (2024)
- [Challenging the Validity of Personality Tests for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05297/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Personality Traits in Large Language Models: Insights from Psychological Questionnaires](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05248/) (2025)
- [Investigating Audio, Visual, and Text Fusion Methods for End-to-End Automatic Personality Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00705/) (2018)
- [LLMvsSmall Model? Large Language Model Based Text Augmentation Enhanced Personality Detection Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07581/) (2024)
- [Personality Trait Detection Using Bagged SVM over BERT Word Embedding Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01309/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Personality-Aware Recommendation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12153/) (2021)
- [First Impressions: A Survey on Vision-Based Apparent Personality Trait Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08046/) (2018)
- [Automatic Personality Prediction; an Enhanced Method Using Ensemble Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04571/) (2020)
- [How Personality Traits Shape LLM Risk-Taking Behaviour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04735/) (2025)
- [Text-Based Automatic Personality Prediction Using KGrAt-Net; A Knowledge Graph Attention Network Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13780/) (2022)
- [What your Facebook Profile Picture Reveals about your Personality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01292/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Video-based Apparent Personality Recognition Using Long Short-Term Memory and Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00381/) (2019)
- [Using Nuances of Emotion to Identify Personality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.6352/) (2013)
- [Evaluating the Efficacy of LLMs to Emulate Realistic Human Personalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14879/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Graph-Enabled Text-Based Automatic Personality Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09103/) (2022)
- [Visual BFI: an Exploratory Study for Image-based Personality Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08117/) (2016)
- [Beyond Contagion: Reality Mining Reveals Complex Patterns of Social Influence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.04192/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [GGBond: Growing Graph-Based AI-Agent Society for Socially-Aware Recommender Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21154/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Personality Recognition by Comparing the Predictive Power of Traits, Facets, and Nuances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05650/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personality Computing is a field at the intersection of Personality Psychology and Computer Science. Started in 2005, research in the field utilizes computational methods to understand and predict human personality traits. The expansion of the field has been very rapid and, by analyzing digital footprints (text, images, social media, etc.), it helped to develop systems that recognize and even replicate human personality. While offering promising applications in talent recruiting, marketing and healthcare, the ethical implications of Personality Computing are significant. Concerns include data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the potential for manipulation by personality-aware Artificial Intelligence. This paper provides an overview of the field, explores key methodologies, discusses the challenges and threats, and outlines potential future directions for responsible development and deployment of Personality Computing technologies.