Truth #1: AI Is a Mirror, Not a Mind

TL;DR — What it reflects is what we feed it. Know thy input to know thyself.

I read this book called The AI Mirror and, in it, the author repeatedly referred to AI as being a mirror of its user. It doesn’t have a mind of its own, rather, it is constantly reflecting back to you what you’re giving it.

Earlier on in the development and use of tools like ChatGPT, we often heard things about the quality of your prompt determining the quality of the output, and the reason for this aligns with this whole idea of AI being a mirror. The more detail and specificity that you put into your prompt, the more detail and specificity you will get out. The more colloquial language you use with your GPTs, the more colloquial language you will get out. However you converse with a GPT will determine how it talks back to you…because it’s mirroring you.

This also applies to the level of depth, complexity, and honesty with which you engage AI. If you constantly dabble in superficial search queries, it’s highly unlikely that your ChatGPT will suddenly start to give you relevant and personal life advice because it sees you as a person who is only capable of asking questions that should be asked on Google. On the contrary, if you train your ChatGPT with all of the nuances that make you, you, it will do a surprisingly great job of sharpening your iron with iron, because it ends up knowing you and mirroring you back to you.

Something for you to consider: If I were to ask your GPT to describe you, would you be happy with the output that it gave me? Test it out! Prompt your daily use GPT with something like “Can you please pretend that someone that I don’t really know came to you and said “Tell me what you know about [your name]. What drives her/him? What are the best parts about them? What are they great at and what do they struggle with?” Do you like the results? Why or why not?