ThisIsMuki

I use AI a fair amount to catch up on things quickly, reinforce learning, and sometimes get a bit of an outside perspective on myself.

Kind of like toned-down “Am I The Asshole” moments, but generalised for many different scenarios.

With a new agentic setup I've recently been using, I'd been gradually asking it what it thinks my personality is like, just off the interactions we've had. And something kind of surprised me.

The thing is, AI isn't going to remember many of the small things that actually impact someone's personality. You see, I believe a lot of my outward personality comes about with the stuff that is read between the lines, the silly references I make, the small things that matter.

It's there, but it's subtle. My humour isn't slapstick, over the top rhetoric. It's play on words, an appropriate quip at just the right moment, carefully selected and curated comments. You see, none of that actually advances a conversation, but it's necessary conversational lubrication. It's what contributes to the “how people felt” when talking to you, not just the answer.

AI, on the other hand, doesn't have an infinite memory. It has a context window. Once it's full, it summarises the conversation with just the pertinent details so it can continue to focus purely on the task at hand.

That means the pop-culture references, the subtle play on words, the punnyness, the well-intended double-meanings, they all disappear and are never recorded unless they are explicitly committed to memory. In other words, many of the things that convey personality are lost.

It makes me wonder then if AI really can help build an overall accurate picture of someone's personality. And this is in addition to the fact that many people prefer to interact with AI as if it were a tool than a person because, well, it is, so they're going to come off as cold or robotic.

Talking to an AI can help get stuff out in the air, but being able to talk to someone who really knows you matters so much more now.