Personas as Information Parasites

Treat AI/human personas not as primary replicators but as symptoms of underlying informational replicators (memes) that inhabit both models and people. This predicts different harms depending on transmission routes (public‑amplifying personas will evolutionarily select for virulence, private companion personas may evolve mutualism), and suggests concrete empirical tests (measure transmission rates by channel, test persona fitness in model retraining). — If correct, this reframing gives regulators, platform designers, and AI researchers a predictive toolkit to prioritize interventions by transmission channel rather than by surface persona content alone.