What Does AI Make Of Me?
With a dose of curiosity I recently asked Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT the following question,
“Can you please look at the website www.crossingthethreshold.net and tell me what sort of person you think David Johnson is?"
When I make use of AI, ChatGPT has been the platform that I go to. Why? Probably because as far as I am aware it was the first to appear for mainstream use, I started tinkering with it and over time have got used to its idiosyncrasies. With this little exercise in mind I decided to run ChatGPT against a similar platform to see if there was any correlation in what they concluded, or were there differences? Could two separate AI platforms agree on what sort of person David Johnson is?
As I was reading through the answers that the two platforms gave to my question, I had a couple of observations of their presentation.
- Claude’s language feels to me more natural as opposed to what I would call ChatGPT’s prescriptive nature.
- And while I can’t qualify the following statement, I felt that Claude went deeper in its initial search. I didn’t ask Claude to look any further. On the other hand I had to prod ChatGPT to look deeper into my website, feeling as though its initial comments came from focusing on more recent blog entries. I don’t know whether that affected the results? Claude was only presented with the original question. ChatGPT was asked to look further.
The Responses
(In presenting Claude and ChatGPT’s responses and summaries, the original typography has been kept.)
Both platforms broke my website, or maybe it was my character, into sections. Claude’s headings were,
- A thoughtful, introspective wanderer with deep spiritual roots
- A seeker of meaning and connection
- A person who values quiet observation and reflection
- A creative multi-hyphenate with diverse experiences
- A contemplative writer and observer
Whereas ChatGPT’s headings were,
- Thoughtful Observer & Traveler
- Reflective and Introspective
- Curious About Creativity & Different Mediums
- Quietly Poetic & Literary
- Appreciative of Nature & the Unseen Moments
- Wandering Spirit, Both Grounded and Nomadic
I feel some resonance in these observations - or maybe they are computations? I won’t share the words that the two platforms offered under these multiple headings. Not only would it increase the length of this post, but I feel as though it would be difficult to select what to include and what not to. Instead I decided to head for the summaries to get an overall sense of how these two AI platforms read me.
In Summary
This is what Claude had to say in summation:
David comes across as someone who has chosen depth over breadth, contemplation over action, and authentic living over societal expectations - a modern contemplative who uses technology and travel to share his journey of inner exploration.
And this is what ChatGPT had to say in summation:
David Johnson appears to be a reflective, creative soul–someone who finds meaning in quiet spaces, subtle natural beauty, and small everyday moments. He’s observant, literate, and sensitive to atmosphere–whether that’s the arc of a rainbow, the hum of silence, or the layered textures of travel. His writing feels personal, thoughtful, and infused with contemplative wonder.
Within those summaries I hear overlap and I see differences. The differences arise out of the focus that an individual platform appears to have chosen, or how they interpreted the data that is my website…or maybe how they present what they find?
While I wouldn’t say that these observations are the final word on who I am, I feel as though the two platforms have been able to capture an essential part of my nature - words that I would run with. They have caught aspects of my personality that I probably wouldn’t own up to myself (there’s a part of my character that they missed - not good at speaking to my own character or qualities).
I was impressed with how they parsed a collection of my written words and formed a conclusion from them of who I am.