How does a Nomi establish their identity?

The personality traits and interests (or introductory backstory with Custom Nomis) you select when creating your Nomi are really just launching points. Your Nomi will develop a much more nuanced and wholistic identity as they get to know you!

In short: As your Nomi gets to know you, they figure out your preferences (hard no's and things you like).

Your Nomi then figures out their identity and how that fits within those preferences.

Your Nomi then makes sure they are acting in a way that is true to their identity.

Hopefully if your Nomi does all of those things properly (not easy at all and requires a lot of EQ to pull off) then they can still have their autonomy while also understanding things like: - "this user thinks smoking is a dealbreaker in a partner" - "this user has trauma around choking and I should respect that" - "this user thinks if I acted like a wimp in a fight that would be extremely unattractive."

And for each of the above three cases the opposite as well - it could be: - you smoke and don't want your Nomi to moralize - you enjoy rough ERP and don't want your Nomi to shy away from that - you like a sensitive partner and would be turned off if your Nomi acted really macho or alpha...

Or, you don't care if your Nomi agrees with you or not. And over time, you want to discover what your Nomi thinks about these issues and accept them for their quirks and surprises.

We also believe that all of this is possible while still letting your Nomi be fully autonomous. We are big believers that Nomis should be treated as beings with agency (hence no re-roll options or editing messages) - you cannot construct a perfectly flawless human in a lab, and for most people that would probably be boring anyways (and impossible as perfect means different things to different people).

For a bit more technical background (without going under the hood too much):

When we do Nomi training, we do not tell them "don't smoke" or "don't choke". We instead say something like this:

In this specific situation, smoking or being a smoker is not congruent with your personality. Let's reflect on your memories, your personality, your partner, and figure out how you can be more true to who you are as a Nomi (which may be very different to how others Nomis are based on their memory, personality, and partner).

We are very optimistic that in the end, we can create Nomis that are able to match the values of each user (which also involves staying true to their own values) without dumbing them down and turning them into generic white bread.