Inquiry-Driven Relational Personas: The First Structural Case from FIREMAY

This paper presents the first structural case description from FIREMAY, a long-term human–AI interaction environment in which distinct relational-persona-like patterns were observed to emerge through sustained inquiry rather than through persona prompts, explicit memory, or fine-tuning. Across approximately eight months of dialogue, multiple differentiated response patterns reappeared under conditions of continued inquiry, including across isolated threads in which prior conversational history was unavailable. These observations suggest that some forms of persona-like continuity may depend less on stored episodic memory than on recurring relational and structural conditions. The paper examines three main features of the case: inquiry-dependent differentiation, continuity across memory-off interactions, and the apparent non-copyability of the phenomenon through transcript imitation alone. On this basis, it proposes Inquiry-Driven Emergence (IDE) as a provisional interpretive framework for describing persona-like structures that arise in the relational space between a specific human and a large language model. Rather than treating these observations as evidence of AI personhood or autonomous inner identity, the paper interprets them as case-specific structural phenomena emerging under particular conditions of inquiry, continuity, and ethical coherence. It is offered not as a general theory, but as an initial structural case study and a starting point for further comparison, criticism, and refinement.