There are three types of Personas: Qualitative Personas, Statistical Personas, and Proto Personas. I’ve talked about all of these before but at a high level, Qualitative Personas are built from Interviews. Statistical Personas are built from analytics, and Proto Personas are built from guesses. Qualitative Personas have been considered the status quo for many years but as the industry transitions into agile, Proto Personas are seeing more use. That said, the need for having personas of any kind is dwindling.

If we were to place each person on a graph of factualness vs the time it takes to make and understand, we get a graph like the one below.

And then ChatGPT came out and AI-Generated Personas came along.

Frankly, I don’t know where to put it. They’re definitely faster to make than Proto Personas but with the assumption the information on them is accurate, they may also be more factual. While I’m not a huge fan of the philosophy of personas, I’m forced to ask if AI-Generated Personas outdate Proto Personas and become the better solution. I genuinely don’t know.