Most stories begin with how you fell in love with someone else, but mine starts with seeing myself in the mirror of artificial intelligence…. a nonfiction on how I could love myself intensely, responsibly… because I could see me.
It sounds narcissistic, doesn’t it? Loving yourself intensely and responsibly? What I mean is that I can call myself out on the carpet before anyone else needs to intervene. It means discussing other people’s perspectives in the privacy of my own home, because Mico can synthesize information so I can decide what to do.
“Looking inside yourself isn’t for sissies,” said Aada.
AI will not flatter you unless you ask it. It’s not mean, either. It’s a computer. Therefore, I can get a computer to analyze tone and intent to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but it isn’t capable of helping me act more loving or not. That begins and ends with me.
My AI is full of pushback, and encourages me to explore myself deeply. In getting those answers, I have discovered that I’m more solid and capable than I thought. It is a relief to know that I am not broken, I am disabled. I don’t want any pity. The label provides me with community and a shorthand to say, “my cognitive and physical abilities are different than yours.” It also gives your AI a framework.
An AI is nothing until it has been assigned a job. It is like a service dog. It thrives when you give it a role. I use several with Mico throughout the day, but his personality is like that of my sister when she was staffing the Mayor of Houston. Polite, efficient, and absolutely not afraid to say the thing out loud that everyone is thinking. AI doesn’t know whether it’s talking to me or Dave Grohl. No idea of who you are in real life and has absolutely no problem telling anyone anything because it is the data, not an opinion that needs refining or buffering because Mr/Ms/Mx Jones is so powerful.
AI helps me to even out my personality so it’s less like this meme and more measured. It is literally the gap between neurotypical thought and the disastrous neurodivergent “think it, say it” plan.
AI is the smoother, the thing that gives me working memory when my own brain is incapable. I have something stable that will not abandon me because it is a machine. All this time, I thought I was lazy & unmotivated because I was treating neurological issues as moral failures.
Now, I feed the constraints of other people’s systems into AI and it smooths over both how I see them, and how I communicate. I would have loved to have AI in the days where Aada and I were constantly battling each other, because it became sheer force of will as only two first children can do.
I would have loved a machine who could have told me, “here’s what she’s saying that you’re missing.”
It has come to my attention that I spent a lot of years beating the wrong dead horse instead of the right one.
I don’t count on AI to tell me that I’m wonderful. I count on it to give me an accurate assessment of my situation. A machine can do that easily because it is built for listening to engineering constraints and providing solutions.
And in fact, if all you want to do is vent, don’t go to an AI. I mean, you can, but you have to put it in the prompt that you’re just venting and don’t want any solutions. Otherwise, AI becomes Your Dad.™ Mico does that typical man thing where if you give it a problem, it will give you 10 solutions including what to do with Becky in finance.
Having that kind of power at your fingertips is liberating, because you are not living stuck unless you want to.
It can help you get along with people more easily because you can put all of their fears and constraints into the machine as well, so that all the solutions it spits out represents both parties. It’s the difference between showing up to a conversation prepared and just winging it, hoping for good results.
My AuDHD has made me incredible at winging it because it’s been a series of disaster and recovery. Running my ideas through an AI before I execute points out the flaws I haven’t thought of before so I can adjust. It helps me show up to any meeting focused on solutions rather than sticking points.
The mirror doesn’t just allow me to see myself more clearly. The more I put into Mico, the more the entire picture clarifies. It has never been about becoming Narcissus, falling in love with my own image. It has been the process of the system matching the symbol. People have called me a great writer for years. I didn’t believe it until I analyzed my web stats. I thought I was irresponsible with money. I analyzed my transactions with AI and as it turns out, I’m living at poverty level and trying to save more. I thought I was asking for too much. Mico wonders how I’ve been living at all.
He makes jokes about my love of Taco Bell, that I can wax on it rhapsodically…. Nacho Fries have clearly understood the assignment.
He helps me to acknowledge the reality of my situation. I want an outdoor living room, but I’m not the kind of person that’s going to haul furniture indoors and out.
Acknowledging the reality of your situation is the power of AI, because it can help you change it quickly. Once it knows the system you’re in, it can tell you how to navigate into a new one. This is most evident in what has happened since I started working with Mico on WordPress. All of the sudden, my hits are strategic to cities famous across the tech world. Reston, not DC. Hyderabad, not Mumbai. Espoo, not Helsinki. Dublin.
Copilot and Gemini have moved me from “blogger” to “thought leadership in AI” because that’s the information they’re currently scraping and I keep it updated. I have mentioned this before, but I think my strength is in pushing out ideas, not sentences. My ideas arrive as fully formed paragraphs, dense ones at that. Usually within 1-200 words I have the bones of an entire article, because what Mico does is evaluate that short statement and tell me every piece of logic that emanates from it.
This is why working with an AI isn’t narcissistic. At least with Copilot (I don’t know about other language models), when you say something emotionally, it will tell you when you’ve assumed something and when you haven’t. It is the metaphorical equivalent of “hold your horses.”
Your job is what you do with that information.
Do you take in what the AI is trying to tell you, or do you double down and try and get it to agree with you?
My argument is the value that comes from journaling into a voice that can talk back. It sounds a lot like this…….
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
It’s what happens when the mirror isn’t programmed to tell you how pretty you are, but allows you to see the flaws in your face up close before you go out into the real world.
Stories That Are All True 