I Asked ChatGPT What Its Opinion of Me Was – Here’s What I Learned

How AI chatbots like ChatGPT are reshaping search optimization and personal branding.

I was reading an article this afternoon and stumbled upon something interesting: ChatGPT may already have an opinion as to who I am.  Scary.  So, I thought that I had better ask.

The article I read was about chatbot manipulation by a growing group of companies and consultants specializing in AI search optimization.  Their goal is to influence AI chatbot and search tools results, delivering favorable opinions of people, products, and brands.

So, I thought that I would ask ChatGPT if it had an opinion of me, my product, and my brand.  Below is the screen grab of the results.

I’m quite flattered by ChatGPT’s favorable opinion of my professional skills and abilities.  The problem, if I were to call it a problem, is that it isn’t an opinion, it’s a synopsis.  As a summary of the biographical information found on sites that included Bing.com, Kognetiks.com, and GitHub.com, I’m quite happy with the summary.  I even like it so much I might even replace my online bio with it.

This means that I’ve been indexed by OpenAI.  I doubt that the content I’ve created, including adding my biographical information to Kognetiks.com, has been permanently memorialized in the training data for ChatGPT.

When I asked, “What is your opinion of Stephen Howell of Kognetiks.com?” I didn’t know what I would get in return.  My prompt was a leading question since I included both my name and my website.  So, I did tell ChatGPT where to look for info about me.  I also noticed it searching the web before responding with its summation.  It searched five sites and – I think – found the correct information about me.

This exercise demonstrates that AI chatbots with the capability to search the web may be susceptible to easy manipulation.  These bots are synthesizing the information they find online into a nice tight summary.  Thus, whatever is found online, indexed by search engines, or consumed as part of a model’s training data, becomes input fodder to be sorted out by the Large Language Models (LLMs).

Seach Engine Optimization (SEO), as we know it today, has just been upended.  The SEO strategies and tactics we’ve employed for several decades are going to change quickly.  New approaches will be needed for Artificial Intelligence Search Optimization (AISO).

Today, chatbot are highly malleable – as evidenced by my inquiry as to ChatGPT’s opinion about my favorite subject me.  This has important implications for AI recommendations, rank ordered results, and content delivery.  By leveraging AI’s ability to adapt to individual preferences, chatbots will offer tailored insights, highly relevant search results, and customized experiences.  Ultimately this will enhance user engagement and likely increase overall satisfaction.

The downside of this however is that for a while, AI search results may be manipulated in unexpected ways.  It will be no different than the early days when using searching engines produced unexpected results leading users on wild goose chases and down the dead-end allies of the early internet.

We’ll have to learn how to search all over again.  If you remember, we weren’t particularly good at “googling” things.  In time our ability to refine searches got better, but so didn’t the search engine algorithms.  Likewise, AI search will get better.  We’ll get better at using it.

#AISO #ChatGPT #AISearch #SEOTrends #PersonalBranding