Does Persona Make LLMs K-pop Fans? A Pilot Study of LLM-Based Online Concert Audience Agents

2026-06-05

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of co-presence in online concerts, which hinders the reproduction of collective audience experiences. The authors propose, for the first time, a persona-driven multi-LLM agent system that simulates ten viewers generating real-time danmaku comments during a K-pop performance, enabling controlled comparisons of how persona conditioning affects interaction quality. Through user evaluations and interview analyses, the experiments reveal that personas significantly enhance the naturalness and content quality of danmaku, yet fail to strengthen perceived social connectedness or emotional resonance. The findings suggest that K-pop danmaku functions more as a “collective monologue,” with meaningful participation rooted in shared identification with the artist and fan community, offering a novel perspective on human–AI collaboration for reconstructing collective affective experiences.

Abstract

A concert is a collective experience, but recorded performance videos are typically watched alone, stripping away the shared audience presence that makes concerts feel eventful. We investigate whether persona-based LLM audience agents can recreate aspects of this collective experience by generating real-time fan chat alongside a K-pop performance video. We present a multi-agent system in which ten LLM agents react through live-chat messages, comparing a persona-conditioned audience (each agent assigned a distinct fan identity, bias, and chat style) with a no-persona baseline. In a within-subjects pilot with K-pop fans (N=11), persona conditioning substantially improved model-level chat quality and perceived naturalness, but did not translate into differences in social connectedness, engagement, or affective response. Interviews suggest that online K-pop concert chat may operate as collective monologue rather than interpersonal dialogue, and that meaningful participation depends on shared identification with the specific artist and fandom. Persona conditioning can make LLM audiences appear more natural, but culturally meaningful collective experience may require deeper alignment between persona, crowd behavior, fandom identity, and user expectations.

Problem

• collective experience
• LLM-based audience agents
• persona conditioning
• K-pop concert
• online fan chat

Innovation

• persona-conditioned LLM
• multi-agent system
• virtual audience
• collective experience
• K-pop fandom