Does GPT-4 Know Me Better Than My Girlfriend?

The answer is: yes. 

I know because I tried it. This week, I built an AI that can simulate me and predict how I would answer personality questions. It can guess my scores better than my girlfriend does. 

(If you try this at home, do not tell your girlfriend/boyfriend/partner this. You should definitely never show them a graph of how badly they did versus an AI. You can try saying, “But baby, it’s just math!”. This doesn’t seem to help for some reason.)

I got into this mess because I had an idea the other night: Can GPT-4 predict my personality? And, more importantly, can it predict my personality from just a little bit of information like stuff I’ve written online or a sampling of notes and journal entries?

I decided to test GPT-4 as follows: I’d take a personality test. Then, I’d give GPT-4 some information about me and ask it to take the same personality test—but pretend to be me. I’d tell it to attempt to predict the ways I’d answer the questions based on what it knows. Then I’d measure the difference between what GPT-4 predicted my responses would be and my actual responses to see how accurate it was.

I’d also ask my girlfriend, Julia, who is unusually perceptive about people and knows me quite well, to do the same task. Then I’d compare GPT-4’s accuracy against hers.

Below are the results. The graph you see measures how well each predictor (the AI, Julia, and random chance) did at predicting my scores: