AI Knows What You Want — But Do You?

How AI can predict your personality type & why it matters

How AI can predict your personality type & why it matters

Photo by Vince Fleming on Unsplash

How well do you know yourself?

You might feel you know yourself quite well.

But how well?

Are you really the person you believe yourself to be?

It can be hard for you to know for sure.

Yuval Noah Harari, Historian and author of Homo Deus : A Brief History of Tomorrow published in 2015 made a prediction:

Algorithms might know you better than you know yourself

This is a short clip of him explaining it:

That was his prediction in 2015.

With modern AI like ChatGPT, 8 years later, it’s coming true.

But how? And what could it mean if AI knows you better than you do?

Personality tests of the past and future

Personality tests are not new, I’m sure you’ve heard of them.

The personality tests you might be familiar with involve asking set questions with fixed answers.

These include tests such as:

• Myers Briggs Type Indicator

• 5 big personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness & neuroticism)

• DISC Assessment

• Enneagram Type

• Hogan Personality Inventory

What’s different about new personality tests using AI, is they use the same technology as ChatGPT to predict a person’s personality type from their unique text responses to certain questions.

Psypost magazine recently published an article about this called Understanding Ourselves through AI: A New Frontier in Personality Assessment.

They highlight the latest research findings:

In a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers found evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, employing sophisticated machine learning algorithms, can effectively infer personality traits from text interactions. This innovative approach, tested on over one thousand undergraduate students, demonstrates a potential new frontier in personality assessment — and may offer an alternative to traditional methods, such as questionnaires.

They compare both the old and new approaches using AI:

In the past, personality traits have been measured through self-report questionnaires in which participants answered a series of questions about their feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. However, these methods are considered to have drawbacks, such as participants’ honesty and the practical challenges of long surveys. The new study explores AI’s potential in this field, using chatbots to analyze language use during online interactions and draw correlations with known personality traits.

They conclude by giving the findings:

The findings of the study were multi-faceted, yet telling. The machine-inferred personality scores showed acceptable reliability — meaning the AI method could consistently and dependably measure personality traits.

It looks like Harari’s predictions are coming true.

So how do you face this new reality?

Preparing for a world where AI can read you like a book

The potential for this application of AI is huge, both the dangers and opportunities.

Let’s look at each of these…

Photo by Gerard Siderius on Unsplash

Things for you to be concerned about

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