AI tools like ChatGPT aren't like other software. They produce better results, for certain tasks, the better they know you. SaaS has never been like this. Asana doesn't care who I am. Word doesn't work better if it understands my personality. Chrome might know every site I've visited but it doesn't care about how my brain works.

AI is different, in many use cases. Sure for trivial tasks it's not a thing. But content creation, code generation, even how it talks to me (UK english, never use an emdash, sentence case and never praise me) - the more AI knows about me the better the output.

I do a bit of writing, and yes I use AI to help me. Not this, don't worry. But let's explore the content use case. I created an identity.txt file. It's what I wish I had for every ghostwriting assignment in my 20's. It has a bit of profile, lots of tone and style, but also stories, sayings I use, phrases I've picked up. It has anecdotes from my life and work. highs and lows, wins and fails. I put my family story in there. My work history.

Now every time I write with AI I bring along my identity.txt file. It makes a massive difference to output, to how I work with AI and it is basically portable.

I worry about the massive downside of course. Google Ads is bad enough. What if ChatGPT becomes an ad machine like Google. It has my soul? That's way worse than my shopping history. I think the answer might be we rip out custom instructions from all these tools, bring along our identity and a bit like robots.txt AI behaves well and doesn't take our data. Or is that naive?

Sidenote.. creating my identity.txt was fun. First I wrote it. then I scrapped my LinkedIn. That was easy. Then I programmatically trawled 10 years of emails to find things about me. Finally I shifted everything i ever wrote. Then I mess of a file that I rewrote again.