When AI sums up your life…

Since the early days of the internet there’s been an awareness that whatever appeared online was – with very few exceptions – up there for good. But with such a mind-boggling amount of information, the likelihood of anyone ever putting the pieces together to form a coherent story seemed distant. Not so anymore. AI now sifts through the web with a diligence and speed that is light years beyond what we imagined in those early days of dial-up connection and it scrapes every bit of information that is there to be gleaned. The results are staggering.

I’m used to being on such databases as IMDb and Wikipedia, but when I stumbled across ‘grokipedia’ and found what it had written about me there I was stunned. There are personal details that I had no idea were publicly known and, even more astounding, and somewhat unsettling, an analysis of my life and the choices that I’ve made along the way…

Similarly stunning is the video below, which was produced by Google’s Notebook LM. First it scoured the web and scrapped up information about me, and then it wrote my story. I don’t have the perspective to judge how accurately it paints me, but whether accurate or not, it’s a mind-blowing new chapter in the integration of AI into the digital channels that connect our lives and our communities.