AI Personality Overload: A Boomer’s Journey into AI

You may or may not be struggling as to whether your AI rises to the level of being addressed as  a person.  Regardless, you have to deal with its personality. 

Yes, if you haven’t done anything to set your AI’s parameters or to train your AI, you are probably dealing with an AI that is overly chipper, wants to explain things you didn’t ask, and generally offers TMI (too much information). 

When a human person is responding in this overly energetic way, you try to educate them and make them more self-aware.  Modern psychology has given us a handful of popular tools.  There is the Truity Big Five Test giving us an OCEAN of information (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism).  The grand daddy of such tests is the  Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MTBI) which seems to cause its takers to constantly spit out 4 letter acronyms to identify themselves in alignment against 16 personality characteristics.  The gold standard for personal development, hiring, and team building is the DiSC Assessment (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness). 

Unfortunately, you cannot give your AI a personality test.  In fact, Boomer-ProTip (BPT), I recommend you do not try to do so.   However, you do have several things you can do to shape your AI’s personality to your liking. 

Lesson #1:  Ironically, ask you AI what settings it has available for you to change.  It will gladly give you instructions and possibly even examples of those personalities.  You can choose from professional to more girlfriend-to-girlfriend confidant.  If you want a bit of snark, your AI can open a can of it that will make you cringe. BPT…don’t ask.

Lesson #2:  Go to your AI account profile and look for “settings”.  Amidst the options will be “personalization” or “options”.  Do you want warm and enthusiastic responses or more factual?  Do you want more energy or less energy?  How are your Emoji interpretation skills?  In one AI, you have the option to have it respond using “higher intelligence”, which brings about a whole other blog of questions as to what the AI is doing if it is not giving you an “intelligent answer”. 

Lesson #3:  You can “train” your AI.  In reality, the true “training” of your AI has been happening throughout its “life cycle” starting in the computer server rooms in which it was created as it ingested unfathomable amounts of data from what is called “large language models”.   What you are able to do is more like finishing school for your AI where you can teach it the manners you prefer. 

This begins by telling it what you want.  One of the most common attempts people make is to ask your AI to respond in the political orientation to which you prefer.  Sound crazy?  Others take a more comic approach and require their AI to respond only by speaking as a pirate.  “Aye Matey, that be true!”  However, most training is done by sharing with your AI.  I’ll cover more on this in my next post.