This review organizes research on personality in LLMs into three problems: self-assessment, exhibition, and recognition. Self-assessment covers work that administers inventories to a model itself; exhibition separates methods that edit model parameters from approaches that induce behavior through prompting, fine-tuning, or related controls; recognition includes direct personality inference and LLM-enhanced recognition systems. The paper states that it reviews 72 studies published since 2022 through June 2024 and provides comparative tables of instruments, models, methods, code, and datasets, together with summaries of conflicting findings, open challenges, and possible applications. Its main value is taxonomic and navigational: it helps readers locate research lines, terminology, resources, and recurring tensions involving prompt sensitivity, validity of human instruments, stability, trait control, and ethics. It is not, however, reported as a reproducible systematic review. The paper does not provide databases, complete search strings and dates, inclusion and exclusion criteria, duplicate screening, extraction procedures, quality or risk-of-bias assessment, or evidence grading. Its claim to be the first comprehensive survey is not established through a verifiable comparison. The corpus is dominated by computer-science publications and preprints, and the authors themselves note insufficient grounding in social science. Resource links are not an archived, versioned artifact or reproduction protocol. The article should therefore be used to navigate the field as it stood in June 2024, not to estimate effects, prevalence, or cumulative certainty, and it is already a historical snapshot given the field’s subsequent rapid expansion.
Research question
How can the emerging literature on personality in LLMs be organized, and what are its main methods, findings, resources, challenges, and applications?