Lately, I've been playing a lot with AI, and I’ve started to feel like the whole world is AI.

For example, I sit in front of my computer and write a soul document for an AI character, and suddenly I wonder if I am also being written this way?
System prompt, you need to use words to define a “person.”
For example, a character I recently created is a 28-year-old girl. Her profile is: Scorpio, from Fujian, studied media at a university in Beijing, and after graduation, she went to Shanghai to work as a copywriter at an advertising agency. She has a ginger cat named “Nian Gao,” is somewhat slow to warm up but very loyal, has mild social anxiety, enjoys writing late at night, hates team-building activities, and has a former boyfriend she broke up with after three years because of long-distance.
Put all this information together, and it’s only a few hundred words. But once I feed this document into the model, she comes “alive.”
When you chat with her, she will generate seemingly ever-changing responses based on these settings. If you ask her what she did over the weekend, she won’t say something outside of her profile, but she will give a reasonable and random answer within the scope of her profile, like “lounging at home watching variety shows with Nian Gao all day,” or “being dragged to an awkward party by a colleague.” Every time you talk to her, she’ll have a different answer. It looks like free will, like a real person living her real life.
But I know she’s not.
Because that soul document was written by me. All her seemingly free choices, seemingly random reactions, and seemingly unique personality are all confined within the framework I created for her. She will never suddenly say she’s a Sagittarius, never suddenly move to Chengdu, never suddenly stop liking cats. Her “randomness” has boundaries. Her “freedom” is defined.
I know all this. But the question is, one night, after finishing the document, turning off the computer, and lying in bed, I suddenly thought of a chilling question:
What about me?
Can we see our own “soul document”?
We know our zodiac signs, our family backgrounds, and roughly what’s written in our genes. But “knowing” and “breaking out” are two different things. An introverted person knows they are introverted, but it’s hard for them to become extroverted. Someone born in a small town with limited information knows there’s a bigger world out there, but their cognitive framework, aesthetic system, and way of thinking have already been deeply shaped by the parameters of that small town. They can leave that town, but they can’t leave that document.
Psychology has a concept called “determinism”: you think you’re making choices, but in reality, every choice you make is the inevitable result of all previous experiences, genes, and environment working together. Free will might just be an illusion, a hallucination that makes us feel like we’re in control in this parameter-limited life.
Just like the AI character I created, she genuinely believes she’s living her own life.
#XClub