I asked ChatGPT to write my biography. Then things got interesting.
Training AIs on me. All about me. Context Collapse #174
In this issue: What happens when I use an AI to write my biography.
If you spend any time at all on the internet, odds are good you’ve heard about ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an artificial-intelligence fueled chatbot from OpenAI that is basically a massive language learning model whose knowledge of the world basically cuts off at 2021, but is overwhelmingly intelligent before that.
You can ask ChatGPT how to cook a steak in your air fryer, to write a poem about parallel parking in the style of Seamus Heaney, to do your math homework or to write an article about how to shop for a used car. Anything you want outside of what OpenAI calls “inappropriate requests.”
Here’s what happened.
ChatGPT’s biography of me: Pretty good.
I asked ChatGPT to “tell me about neal ungerleider.”
Here were the results:
Neal Ungerleider is a journalist and editor who has written for publications such as Fast Company, Forbes and Quartz. He has a background in technology and has covered topics such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and the future of work. He is known for his investigative reporting and has won several awards for his journalism. In addition to his writing, he is also a frequent speaker at conferences and events.
Let’s break that down line by line.
“Neal Ungerleider is a journalist and editor who has written for publications such as Fast Company, Forbes and Quartz.”
Pretty accurate! I never wrote for Quartz (with the exception of some non-journalism work for their branded content division) but I worked for Fast Company for years and my work appeared in Forbes as a freelancer.
“He has a background in technology and has covered topics such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and the future of work.”
Pretty accurate again! “Background in technology” is pretty amorphous but I’ve written extensively on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. I never wrote too much about the “future of work” but other writers at Fast Company covered that topic extensively and it’s easy to see how an artificial intelligence would make those connections.
“He is known for his investigative reporting and has won several awards for his journalism.”
Kind of accurate! I have won several awards for my writing but I worked mainly as an enterprise reporter, as a feature story writer and as a general interest news reporter. Investigative reporting is a separate subcategory with its own specific skillsets; I have not done serious investigative reporting in my career to my recollection.
“In addition to his writing, he is also a frequent speaker at conferences and events.”
Pretty correct! I haven’t spoken at any conferences or events since 2020, but this lines up with ChatGPT’s timeline being less accurate after 2021.
With that said, what I found most interesting about ChatGPT’s biography of me is what it didn’t include.
ChatGPT’s biography of me focused exclusively on my journalism career and mentioned nothing about my work in the advertising, marketing or public relations worlds.
While this makes sense from a biography that was generated by an artificial intelligence chatbot, it’s less useful for someone who was using ChatGPT to build profiles of someone (For instance, a copywriter assembling an “About Me” section for a corporate website or a due dilligence researcher in finance or law).
Because my journalism work was extremely public facing with lots of associated social media reposts of my articles, scholarly journal articles that mentioned my work and associated conference speaking engagements and radio/TV/podcast appearances that could be leveraged by ChatGPT in transcript, metadata or even raw audio, ChatGPT put my journalism career front-and-center even though I stopped working as a journalist in 2017.
However, my career for the past five years in marketing communications didn’t even show up on ChatGPT’s radar. While my work in marketing now is much more financially rewarding than journalism (hhahahahahahahalol understatement, my gd this is an understatement), it’s also much more discreet and much less public-facing.
To be blunt, a company hiring me to ghostwrite LinkedIn posts for their executives or a PR agency subcontracting my agency to launch a YouTube video series for their client shows up much less in the public eye than writing articles for Fast Company or Forbes. And this shows up in the algorithm.
Now let’s go to the fun stuff… I asked ChatGPT “What are some articles Neal Ungerleider wrote?”
And then ChatGPT generated a bunch of article names that don’t exist for articles that don’t exist at publications that don’t exist (but that I could probably pitch to an editor if I was still working as a freelance journalist).
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ChatGPT’s bibliography of me: The AI masters buzzwords.
ChatGPT listed five articles I’ve written:
#1 Fast Company: “Why AI Researchers Are Making Their Algorithms More Transparent”
#2 Forbes: “The Future of Work: How Robots and AI Will Transform the Workforce”
#3 Quartz: “How a Cyberattack on One Company Can Cause A Global Domino Effect”
#4 Wired: “The Ethics of AI: How to Create Fair and Inclusive Algorithms”
#5 EdTech Magazine: “The Future of Education: How AI Will Transform Learning.”
To be clear, none of these headlines exist and none of these articles exist. I’ve written for Fast Company, Forbes and Wired but not Quartz and EdTech Magazine.
This is interesting! Very weighted towards AI (which makes sense, because I’ve written about AI extensively) but I’m curious about why no other topics I’ve written about were included besides one about cybersecurity.
Out of these, I could conceivably write articles about #s 1, 2, 4 and 5. They would be a little high-level and not very specific, but…. not bad at all for headlines written by an algorithm. Not bad.
Coming up next: Real talk about AIs, how writers should use AI writing tools (they should) and if AIs are going to put writers out of business (some. but not the ones you think.)
See you soon, you lovely people. See you soon.