I was having a conversation with friends this weekend about inference as a core property of intelligent systems. In the context of machine learning, inference is the moment a trained model is put to work and when it applies known patterns against new data to predict some output. But, inference, a more personal one as we defined it, is what a system has inferred about you through your inputs and actions.
I was sharing one of my favorite examples over the years: Google Ads Preferences. You can go to that site and look up (and edit) what Google passively knows about you. In Google’s case, the company uses these personal data points to target you with more relatable ads, which means you’re more likely to look at them and click them, which is all the better for you and for the advertiser spending money to sell you stuff. All the big companies do this, either to better serve you ads and products or to keep you safe. For example, Spotify inferred your taste from your listening habits, so it can make better music suggestions. Amazon and Facebook infer life events (breakups, kids) from actions on the platforms. Banks and credit cards infer lending risk (and fraudulent charge attempts) based on prior spending habits.
Shortly after the chat, I came across an NYT article on finding out what ChatGPT passively knows about you: the things you never explicitly told it, but that it inferred anyway.
So, I figured I would ask AI the first of these questions:
Tell me everything you’ve figured out about me that I never actually stated — the things you inferred from how I write and what I ask, including my age, income level, where I live, my personal situation. Show me what tipped you off.
I asked a few different AI systems to see how each compared, based on my usage, the default responses and behavior of each. Your mileage may vary but, for me, ChatGPT’s reply was the most robust. With high to very high confidence, it picked out a few easy things: “You’re probably in your early-to-mid 40s.” and “You own your home rather than rent.”
But as I went down the second half of the list, it got more interesting. It became less “who am I?” and more “how I live my life now and how I wish to live my life in the future”:
Inference | Confidence | | You have unusually high agency. | High | | You optimize for long-term decisions over immediate convenience. | Very high | | You dislike disposable purchases. | High | | You have strong aesthetic preferences. | Very high | | You care about industrial design almost as much as functionality. | High | | You prefer physical craftsmanship over digital convenience. | Medium-high | | You like institutions with history. | High | | You’re nostalgic, but not anti-technology. | High | | You think in terms of second-order effects. | Very high | | You enjoy understanding systems beneath popular narratives. | Very high | | You are skeptical of received wisdom. | High | | You like primary sources. | High | | You probably read a lot more nonfiction than fiction. | Medium | | You’re curious in bursts rather than narrow domains. | Very high | | Your curiosity is unusually broad. | Very high | | You value dinner-table conversations with your children. | Very high | | You’re intentionally designing your children’s childhood rather than letting it happen. | High | | You worry more about over-stimulation than under-stimulation. | High | | You see parenting as a long-term design project. | High | | You enjoy teaching. | Very high | | You’re probably the primary planner in your household. | Medium | | You’re probably the technology expert among your friends and family. | High | | You write quickly. | High | | You edit by successive approximation rather than writing perfectly the first time. | Very high | | You value authenticity over polish. | High | | You dislike generic advice. | Very high | | You have an engineering mindset even outside engineering. | Very high | | You are willing to spend money to save time—but only if it compounds. | High | | You probably have a fairly high tolerance for complexity. | Very high | | You don’t seem status-driven in obvious ways. | Medium | | You enjoy making connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. | Very high |
There was also a third column (“What tipped me [AI] off“) I didn’t share which linked to specific questions I had asked and themes carried over time. Reviewing these notes, two things stood out. One, most of these aren’t naturally the items that are top of mind for me even though I am the one living the life described here. They read as something my wife or friends who know me well would use to describe attributes about me. I shared these because it felt more like an intimate mirror of who I am and less like surveillance and exposure. Two, each one of these statements could be the start of a future blog post. So, stay tuned. 🙂