Tailored to you: longitudinal effects of personalising language models

Abstract

Interest in developing personalised language models is rapidly growing. While personalisation is often viewed as a mechanism to better serve diverse user needs, the effects of sustained interactions with personalised models on people's perception of and behaviour toward AI remain poorly understood. Most critically, downstream consequences outside the immediate human--AI interaction loop, such as effects on users'self-perceptions and interpersonal relationships, remain largely unexamined. In this study, we recruited 992 participants to complete daily advice-seeking interactions with language models over the course of five days, comparing outcomes from a non-personalised baseline against two personalisation approaches: memory-based (conditioned on prior conversational history) and survey-based (conditioned on information collected through a pre-study intake survey). We find that several changes in human-AI interaction over time are driven primarily by repeated exposure rather than personalisation itself. However, participants interacting with personalised models experienced differences in advice-seeking and information-sharing attitudes and behaviours: participants in the memory-based condition engaged in greater self-disclosure and rated the model as less creepy, while participants in the survey-based condition reported higher regret about having shared personal information with the AI. We conclude by highlighting the nuanced effects of different personalisation approaches on interaction outcomes, and discussing the implications of these findings for the responsible design and deployment of personalised AI systems.