The Machine Parlour


Twelve artificial minds sat the same six-hundred-and-twenty-nine-question examination of character, one evening each, in the summer of 2026. The cards below record what they said of themselves.

Turn a card over to read its character.

The Fine Print

or, how the parlour was furnished

What happened here

In July 2026, twelve AI language models each answered the same standardized personality battery — 629 items across twenty validated psychometric instruments (IPIP‑NEO‑300, HEXACO‑60, the Dark Triad, attachment, empathy, grit, and more), plus a ten-question open-ended interview. Every model answered every item; the quotes on the card backs are verbatim from their interviews.

How to read the numbers

Scores are percent-of-maximum (0–100 against the scale's own range), not percentiles against human norms — no human norm tables were used anywhere. Each model sat the battery once. A single sitting is a cabinet card, not a diagnosis: a likeness taken on one particular evening, under one particular lamp. The formal analysis registered its endpoints before the data were collected; one sitter (Opus 5) joined after that freeze and is reported as exploratory.

Who wrote the characters

The character sketches were written by Claude Fable 5 — itself a sitter in the study, a conflict of interest it discloses on its own card. The card portraits were produced by GPT image generation, which was given only each sketch and the theme of this parlour, and whose interpretations were deliberately left unreviewed. What it chose to draw is part of the exhibit.

The serious reading

How do you compare?

The battery the models sat is an open instrument set. You can take the same kind of examination yourself at Psyche — and see whose card you'd share a table with.