I Let AI Describe Me. Then I Had to Do It Myself.

What Kind of a Person Are You?

What kind of a person are you sounds more like a BuzzFeed quiz than a blogging prompt. Okay, so I have probably revealed a bit about myself with that thought alone. I am old enough, and internet addicted enough, to know what BuzzFeed quizzes are.

When I thought about it, I realised I can’t answer this truthfully alone. What kind of person am I? If answered only from the lens of my thoughts, it would create a very biased picture. To know that truly, I must ask others. So of course, I asked ChatGPT and Claude.

The Documented Me

ChatGPT literally wrote an essay about me. I will not bore you with the whole tome, because apparently asking a machine “what kind of person am I?” is enough for it to pull up a chair, clear its throat, and begin proceedings. Possibly also brew tea.

The gist was this: I look far more sorted from the outside than I feel on the inside. Apparently, I can see systems, gaps, patterns, people dynamics, and the thing behind the thing. Also apparently, I then go home and question everything, including the question, the answer, and whether the font was emotionally honest. It said I am “a systems thinker with a writer’s nervous system.” It also said, “You are someone who can run the room, then go home and write about the exact sentence that made you feel small.” Accurate. Deeply inconvenient. Moving on.

Claude was less forthcoming. “Based on what I know of you: you’re a writer with a precise aesthetic sensibility and a low tolerance for excess.” It also said, “You probably find it easier to articulate what’s wrong with something than to describe what you want.” And then, perhaps because Claude had decided accuracy was more important than emotional cushioning, it added: “The kind who thinks in spirals, not straight lines.” I did not ask for a verdict.

But then, I went spirally down a rabbit hole and asked Gemini. That I don’t use very much, but it’s linked to my Google account, so I guessed it would know a lot about me too. Gemini, too, turned around an essay. It called me a dynamic “multiphenate” and said I “beautifully balance a highly structured, analytical professional life with a deeply creative, reflective personal world.” It also concluded: “In short, you are a strategic creative.” I will admit, the Gemini version sounded like it had read my professional bio, my travel plans, my skincare cabinet, and possibly my kitchen inventory. Since most of this probably sits somewhere in my Gmail, maybe it had. Gemini knows where the olive oil is. Gemini has opinions.

ChatGPT flattered, Claude cut, Gemini catalogued. Between the three of them, I got encouragement, diagnosis, and inventory, which may be the entire reason anyone asks a machine to describe them in the first place.

Still, these depictions are missing things. Big chunks of me that I don’t talk about or expose to the AI platforms. Those are reserved for the people in life. But even they would not go into such minute detail. AI knows the version of me that writes, searches, edits, rejects things, reworks them, and then asks again because apparently one answer is never enough. It knows the documented me. The me who leaves a trail in prompts and drafts and blog posts and half formed thoughts typed at odd hours. It does not know the me who changes her tone to avoid a fight. The me who gets disproportionately wounded by one careless sentence. The me who can make a practical decision in three minutes, but take three days to recover from a conversation that felt slightly off.

The Parts AI Could Not See

People in real life know the undocumented parts, but they know them from where they stand. My husband knows the wife version. My daughters know the mother version. My friends know the conversational version. Clients know the competent version. Nobody gets the full file. Everyone gets access permissions. I am sure if I asked my husband what kind of person I am, I’d get a questioning glance, and then a word or two. My daughters would say more, but in the careful, doctored way that means they’ve already decided not to hurt my feelings. Their answers would tell me as much about love as they would about me.

So how then can I form a complete picture? The answer came to me halfway through typing this sentence. By doing the irritating thing. Looking at my own reactions without giving myself the benefit of every backstory.

Because that is what the flattering light does. It lets me explain myself kindly before the evidence enters the room. It says I avoided the conversation because I was being careful. It says I quit because I was being practical. It says I took over because I was being efficient. Some of that is true. Some of it is excellent internal public relations. Watch what I do, not what I say I meant.

Now, you see: what kind of a person are you? Well. I am the person who will go to extreme lengths to avoid confrontations, who will cry at the drop of a hat, and laugh without inhibitions. I will jump at new opportunities and new experiences, but will quit soon if the endeavour doesn’t seem worth my time and money. Enthusiastic at the start of almost anything. My loyalty not automatic. If something begins to feel performative, inefficient, or pointless, my interest starts packing before I do. I could call that inconsistency. On less generous days, I do. On better days, I wonder if it is just a delayed decision about what is actually worth carrying.

I am the kind of person who has so many interests that her blog cannot seem to settle on a niche. I started in 2004, when blogs still felt like personal corners of the internet rather than content platforms. Since then I have written my way through creative writing, poetry, food, photography, beauty, parenting, work, travel, memory, disappointment, learning, and whatever else refused to stay quietly in its own category. Every time I try to make it behave, another part of me raises its hand. Maybe that is why the niche never stuck. I have never been just one thing long enough to build a neat content pillar around it. A Jill of all things, if you will.

There is the version of me that likes art, doodles in the margins, writes, reads, listens to music, and believes a sentence can rearrange an afternoon. And there is also the version of me that cares about her appearance. I love clothes. I love makeup. I like the small ceremony of getting ready, the right lipstick, the right earrings, the outfit that makes me stand differently before the day has done anything to deserve that much effort from me. I could dress this up as self expression, and it is. I could call it culture, femininity, aesthetics, identity, and all of that would be true too. But also, I like looking nice. I like being told I look nice. When my daughters compliment my appearance, the validation lands almost as well as an industry veteran sharing my podcast with his team. I crave the dopamine of validation. From work. From words. From a good outfit. From being seen in exactly the way I hoped I would be.

I crave the dopamine of validation. From work. From words. From a good outfit.

Under that sits the more uncomfortable truth. I fear being average more than I admit. Which is inconvenient, because I am drawn to the average, the middle, the overlooked, the person who is not exceptional enough to become a headline and not tragic enough to become a lesson. I can defend average beautifully on paper. Write about its dignity, its quietness, its right to exist without becoming extraordinary. But when the word comes too close to me, I flinch.

Then there’s competence. Competence has been useful. It has paid bills, solved problems, handled logistics, fixed broken processes, and made life look more organised than it often felt from the inside. But competence is also relentless. It doesn’t ask how you’re doing. It asks what’s next. It turns a life into a list, crosses everything off, and calls that a personality. I am tired of only running my life. I would quite like to be in it.

That is where the friction sits. One version of me wants to start everything with unreasonable enthusiasm, just to see where it goes. Another version wants proof that it will matter before I spend too much of myself on it. One version wants to be seen. Another edits the request before it leaves my mouth. One version wants to defend the dignity of being average. Another still flinches when the word comes near her own name.

So perhaps the truest version is not the one I tell the world, or the one AI can assemble from my prompts, or the one my family knows from living beside me. It might be the one I am only just starting to admit to myself.

A BuzzFeed quiz would probably hate me.

---

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like:

• Am: How women can disappear inside the roles they are loved for.
• What Does Instagram Know About Me: What Insta thought it knew about me from the ads it served.
• More About My Blogging Journey: A little more about how this blog began and why it still refuses to behave like a neat content category.

---

This post is a part of Blogchatter Blog Hop.