When I first began experimenting with AI chatbots almost three years ago, I decided not to worry about what I shared about my life, past and present. I’d been blogging for more than 20 years so it was all “out there” already. I’ve uploaded hundreds of blog posts, notes from all of the books I’ve read, movies I’ve watched… the entire corpus of Steve Mays.

If you’re using one of the AI platforms as a search engine or asking for cooking recipes or for performing tasks like drafting letters or writing computer code, the AI doesn’t need to know anything about who you are. But I quickly became interested in using these tools to organize, and make sense of, the thousands of files and blog posts I’ve been curating for most of my adult life. To do that, the AI needs context. Who is this person? What does he think? What does he feel?

My interest in self-inquiry and tendency toward introspection obviously had a lot to do with how I interact with Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and —once upon a time— ChatGPT.

Today I added some work history to the “corpus.” Continue reading →