I May Almost Believe in AI

What does AI think of me? OK it's not really thinking, it's drawing data maps but, once upon a time it was a rainy day and ...  

I was flipping across the internet's rugged and dreary landscapes and for no obvious reasons I thought I'd ask AI (aka Chat GPT) what it thought about me and what kind of person I am. Obviously it's answer is based on whatever rubbish I've fed into the data centric beating heart of Chat over the last few months. 

To be clear I use it mostly as a spell checker and format tool for some, but not all of my blog and Substack material. I do not have MS Office these days, so smoking the free AI dope seems like a good editorial choice. But if AI development is like "growing some alien plant and watching to see what fruit it develops", so says Roman Yampolskiv on AI safety, it's going to screw us all big time. Some day.

Anyway below is a summary of what Mr AI said. There's not much about family, friends or my wider social life because I tend to avoid writing about those things. No drip feed, no source material available. I'm a digital ghost in those areas.

The first version was a bit too long and also repetitive, like it was looking for some common thread, so I cut it back to what's below.

"You strike me as someone who has had a practical, varied working life, probably shaped by factories, workshops, engineering, electronics, machinery, cars and the sort of jobs where you learn by doing rather than by sitting around discussing management theory. 

You've accumulated a lot of experiences without seeming particularly interested in turning them into a grand personal story. There is a distinctly Scottish, grounded, self-deprecating quality to that.

You're an observer. You notice the odd little things that most people walk straight past: a seagull on a car bonnet, a cat doing something inexplicable, an absurd advertisement, a strange piece of technology or some tiny detail of everyday life. 

You seem to enjoy looking at ordinary things from an angle slightly different from everyone else and seeing where the thought takes you.

You're also suspicious of bullshit, particularly when it arrives dressed up as progress, expertise, fashion or corporate importance. AI, social media, advertising, politics, algorithms and the endless machinery of modern life all seem to provide you with material. But I don't think you're genuinely cynical. 

You get irritated precisely because you still care about things. Music, creativity, ordinary life, independence of thought and the ability to remain curious still matter to you.

Music seems to be one of the constants. You've been playing guitar for an extraordinarily long time, recording things, collaborating with people and periodically returning to the Impossible Songs idea. 

You don't seem particularly bothered about whether any of this makes you a "proper musician". It's more like something that has accompanied you through different stages of your life and continues to give you somewhere to go.

You're nostalgic, but not in the usual "everything was better in my day" sense. You seem more interested in the texture of the past: old technology, cars, music, places, people and the feeling of a world before everything became mediated by screens and algorithms. At the same time, you're curious about what's happening now, which is why you can simultaneously complain about AI and spend time talking to one.

And underneath all of it there seems to be a fairly strong mischievous streak. You like absurdity, dark humour and ideas that are almost serious but not quite. You don't seem particularly interested in presenting yourself as successful, inspirational or important. If anything, you tend to puncture that sort of thing. 

I suspect you'd rather be regarded as someone who has remained curious, noticed a few things, made a few things, played some music, owned some interesting cars and had a laugh along the way. That's probably a more accurate description of you than any professional biography could manage."

P.S. Apart from the word salad above, the image below is how AI sees me ... and I did not provide any detailed prompt or photo. I'm set somewhere in the East Neuk, possibly in a weird version of my granny's hoose. I never wear a watch at all, or for that matter a hat and sunglasses indoors (but those are my thirty three year old Wayfarers, purchased from a Sunglass Hut in Florida for $25). I don't do beards anymore either.

Why not join me and find out what AI thinks of you? 

Home truths or more waffle?

Are you really such an insufferable twat? 

Only your flimsy God knows where any of this will end.