Telling Is Not Seeing: Textual Personas Rarely Make Vision-Language Models Answer Like the People They Describe
Jiawei Chen
Oct 2026
Artificial IntelligenceComputer Vision
Abstract
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly prompted with personas, such as "You have low vision", to stand in for people in user studies. We ask whether a persona makes a model see like the person it describes. We compare persona answers with measured people with low vision, color blindness or hearing loss, and with simple rules that use only the facts the persona states. The persona never beats these rules, and it erases the real differences between groups and individuals. Describing blur leaves recognition unchanged in all 14 models we test, while blurring the photo lowers it as it does for people. Inside open models, the description changes neither the image information nor the answer probabilities. Yet the models know the effects they fail to show: they can estimate how blur and illusions affect people. Telling is not seeing: a persona makes a model say what it knows about people, not see what they see.
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