https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10054

Key findings:

-Tested 162 personas across 6 types of interpersonal relationships and 8 domains of expertise, with 4 LLM families and 2,410 factual questions

-Adding personas in system prompts does not improve model performance compared to the control setting where no persona is added

-Automatically identifying the best persona is challenging, with predictions often performing no better than random selection

-While adding a persona may lead to performance gains in certain settings, the effect of each persona can be largely random

Fun piece of trivia - the paper was originally designed to prove the opposite result (that personas make LLMs better). They revised it when they saw the data completely disproved their original hypothesis.