This paper proposes a round-trip evaluation: turn human psychometric profiles into synthetic life stories and test whether other LLMs recover the original scores from the stories alone. It uses PARSEL, a corpus of conversations and cooperative tasks with 297 participants; 290 have complete profiles and 248 have at least three conversations. Claude Opus 4.6 receives all 60 HEXACO items and six domains, nine additional subscales, trust, psychopathic traits, and social interaction anxiety, biographical facts extracted from conversations, and an appearance description derived from webcam images. It writes an approximately 1,000-word immersive profile. Ten generators produce 24-turn, roughly 8,000-word McAdams interviews; Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4, and Gemini 3 Flash score them blindly. In the primary GPT-4.1→Sonnet path, mean source-to-recovered correlation is r=.750, bootstrap 95% CI [.730, .768], ranging from .682 for Conscientiousness to .825 for Extraversion. The nine non-HEXACO subscales reach r=.314-.645. The three primary generators scored by Sonnet are close: GPT-4.1 .750, Gemini 3 Flash .744, and Grok 4.1 Fast .740. In five-way matching, Haiku and Grok select the correct personality-only profile on 79% of trials and Gemini on 95.2%, although the four distractors are random and Gemini also prepared the stripped profiles. The central result is useful but should be read as designed information transfer: the input contains exact scores and Claude explicitly translates them into facet language and examples before story generation. r=.750 shows that this signal survives a score→profile→story→score channel; it does not establish autonomous, natural, or stable personality. The paper calls .887 a human ceiling and describes .750 as 85% of it, but .887 comes from another sample and a 13-day HEXACO-100 retest, whereas this study uses HEXACO-60 and synthetic text. It is contextual reference data, not a comparable held-out ceiling. The real-conversation validation contains a material statistical error: the text, abstract, and Table 7 caption say that nine of ten story–conversation correlations survive Bonferroni at alpha .005. The reported p values show only five do: vulnerability, agency, emotional valence, dominance, and emotional intensity. Communion p=.008, warmth .010, emotional complexity .013, and disclosure depth .039 are significant only without that correction; humor is not. The real-conversation emotional-variability correlation, r=.170 and p=.007, also misses .005 and uses the same participants and coders, making it within-sample convergence rather than independent replication. Two further confounds matter. Biographical facts supplied to story generation come from the same conversations later used as criterion, creating a conversation→prompt→story→comparison path without a psychometrics-only ablation. Story and conversation features may also correlate because both depend on the same profile; the study does not control the 15 supplied constructs to establish incremental individual fidelity. The same LLM rubric coders label both contexts, while conversation reliability is modest, three-coder ICC .483. Methods say three annotators are averaged, yet result tables use only the Gemini–Haiku pair after calling it the best pair, with no prespecified rule for dropping GPT-5.4 Mini. The Jaccard check finds no near-verbatim item copying, but cannot detect semantic paraphrase, and the paper itself counts 7.9 thematically overlapping self-descriptions per story. The main text also says nine generator–scorer pairs; after self-scoring is excluded, Table 4 contains eight nonempty primary pairs with the same r=.719-.750 range. Models are compared at different N, 290 or 154; prompt and scoring choices are selected on pilots reused in evaluation; and one diffusion model cannot causally locate the effect in training data. For privacy, full profiles, dark traits, anxiety, conversations, and appearance pass through several providers. The original PARSEL paper reports approval VCWE-2021.168, but this preprint anonymizes the identifier and does not clarify whether consent and approval cover this reuse, API transfers, or impersonating story generation. No code, prompts, outputs, or analyses are public; release is promised upon acceptance. The evidence supports robust transfer of supplied scores into long text, not individual human-behavior simulation or a validated replacement for psychometric assessment.
Research question
Does human psychometric information survive being transformed into narrative profiles and life stories generated by LLMs, can other LLMs recover it, and are the characteristics of those stories related to real conversations of the same people?