Follow-up Posting on Cyborg Psychologist

Thank you for taking the time to take the test, and I appreciate your letting us know how you perceived its results, as this is most helpful for its authors in refining the tool.

As we said in the short essay explaining the little Cyborg Psychologist, its planning and evaluative process weren’t the result of AI but a combination of existing testing techniques put together in what is meant to be a humorous way. The testing items are based on the Big Five Personality Traits, which have become, in some ways, the hard currency of psychological trait theory. This experiment was meant to point out that artificial intelligence doesn’t replace the human being but is a reflection of ourselves in the mirror — and, in the process, demonstrates how this reflection necessarily changes our self-image.

And, as we described, the AI component of the application is meant as a demonstration of how state-of-the-art, on-on-the-shelf elements can already be cobbled together into a functional black box with many practical uses ranging from replacing television announcers to developing sophisticated educational assistants as Philipp Burckhardt has designed for learning statistical methodologies. What is so interesting is how he envisions creating individually-tailored educational assistants that could follow a specific student across their educational path, becoming attuned explicitly to their learning styles and disabilities. This possibility could also be extended to those with physical disabilities or, as you point out, assisting folks with self-reflective psychological analysis, which was the thinking behind the Cyborg Psychologist. Probably the most critical point in this little experiment is demonstrating that AI’s aren’t a way of eventually supplanting human intelligence and creativity, but as an assisting supplementation of the human ability to create something out of nothing: ex creatio nihilo.

Thanks for the reminder to check my email for the results from clicking through it yesterday!

Perhaps I am inadequately similar to the people it was tested on, but I find it quite disappointing. The output reads like a poorly designed horoscope -- it feels like it's tuned to emit claims which are supposed to resonate with anyone, and intermittently fail to resonate with me due to my own eccentricities.

In taking the test, I answered quickly on the questions where an answer seemed blatantly obvious, and paused longer on those where I felt uncertain and had to think more deeply. Despite this spread of response times, my result began with "Hmm ... It looks like you just clicked through the test quickly, perhaps because you wanted to get a quick overview or take a look at the questions. In any case, this merits the caveat that the results will likely not be very meaningful, so you may consider re-taking the test!".

Borderline incoherent and often self-contradictory, the rambling results only resemble therapy to the extent that performance art also does. There's certainly a lot of potential in getting people to analyze themselves with a little automated prodding, going back to Eliza, but this app doesn't give me the impression that it adds anything which couldn't have been implemented pre-GPT.