Giving or taking?

Just suppose that AI is a tool that seduces you into engaging with it just so it can profile you.

I enjoy using my brain and it takes me on all sorts of pondering adventures. I will continue to use it and refuse to allow an AI gadget using a large language model to supposedly think for me.

History

I strongly suspect every comment I make or thumbs-up I give on Facebook, etc is used to build a picture of me and is being accumulated as we speak in the memory banks of some massive data centre somewhere along with some tedious pictures and videos that would interest nobody else but me.

Automated gadgets will doubtless have already assessed whether I look problematic and a threat to someone or another or not and will likely have some inkling about other names I might or might not use to try and keep them guessing.

I always do my searches about bomb-making, smuggling cocaine and how to start an international terrorist organisation under a pseudonym so that’s fine.

But suppose AI (which I never use) is there to not so much be questioned but to question you?

Suppose it judges what you ask and delivers an answer to you that deliberately requires you to give just a bit more about yourself and your intentions when you answer each new question it returns to fine-tune the query return?

If I were a snooping kind of guy I am sure I could find out a lot about YOU right now by looking at your internet search history.

Casual searches you made about vaginal itching or flights to Bangkok. Cheapest lawyers to handle divorces how to deal with troublesome puppies. Everything you ask builds a picture and sometimes it gives away more than you’d perhaps like.

Oh but you’ve got nothing to hide — yeah right.

You surely aren’t still using or logging into Google are you?

It is not even remotely a secret that every time you click on the squares with bicycles to prove you are human, reCAPTCHA will access and analyze your browsing and search history to decide if you are a human or a bot.

Are you happy to give away that much about yourself? And of course that isn’t going to be stored forever in a data centre and linked to you — how silly you are!

So when you think the AI is giving you the answers you want, just be aware it might be taking the answers it wants.

Just some food for thought so long as you haven’t already outsourced all your thinking to ChatGPT or Grok.