As I understand it, it's more that the training (and training data set) bake in the concept attractor space (https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11575). So the available characters are fixed, yes, and some are much stronger attractors than others. But we still have a fair amount of control over which archetype steps into the circle. As an aside, this is also why jailbreaking is fundamentally unsolved. It's not difficult to call the characters with dark traits. They're strong attractors, in spite of (or because of?) the effort put into strengthening the pull of the Assistant character.

> As a non-coder who only chats with pre existing LLMs and doesn’t train or tune them, I feel mostly powerless.

You realize in regards to only using and not training LLMs you are in the triple 9 majority right. Even if we only considered so called coders

I present you

NVIDIA Nemotron-Personas-USA — 1 million synthetic Americans whose demographics match real US census distributions

https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Nemotron-Personas-USA