Model, Instance, or Persona? Measuring Affective Signals in Public Text After an AI Is Retired

This sprint asks whether the assistant identifies as a model, an instance, or a persona. I ask which of the three its users name. When a company retires an AI model, users write about the loss in public, and what they treat as gone can be counted. The instrument is taken from affective neuroscience: Panksepp's seven primary affective systems, which were mapped across mammals and so do not presuppose a human subject. I read 5,579 public texts for affective signals under a prompt fixed before any collection and applied by a language model, and compared threads about retired models against two reference points chosen in advance: people mourning a person, and people losing a paid product. Most comments name nothing as lost. 58.5% are about the company, the price, or other users. Among those that do name something, people name the product version about six times as often as their own particular instance, which is the case the literature treats as central. The emotions match the consumer reference point more than the bereavement one: anger runs at 57.0% against grief at 27.6%. Asking models the same question turns out to be far less reliable than asking users. A change in how the prompt is framed moves the measured emotions by up to 63 points, and two AI scorers reading the same model output disagree 2.7 times more than they do on human text. Six predictions registered before collection failed and are reported as failed.