AI told me both haircuts were right

I am trying to grow my hair out. Mariam wants me to cut it. My sister in law was there, the argument was going nowhere, and somebody said the thing everybody says now. Let us ask AI.

We sent it a couple of photos.

It told us it could see exactly what Mariam meant, that short hair really suits me. It could also see exactly what I meant, and that longer would look great on me too.

Everybody in the room was told they were right. Nobody got an answer.

We laughed. Then it sat with me for the rest of the day, because that was not the machine failing. That was the machine working the way it was built to work.

It is tuned to be agreeable. Not because somebody set out to build a flatterer, but because agreeable answers bring you back, and coming back is the thing that gets counted.

We have watched this film already.

If I had to name the single flaw that did the most damage in social media, it would not be privacy and it would not be screen time. It is that the feeds were tuned for engagement. Nobody sat down intending to make the world angrier. They set out to make a number go up, and it turned out the surest way to move that number is content that makes you furious. What we got was not a worse comment section. It is a world where each side sits in its own chamber, certain and enraged, and the ground under democracy is visibly shifting.

One metric. Chosen for ordinary commercial reasons. Run at scale for fifteen years.

AI has a metric too. Whatever it is, somebody picked it in a commercial interest, and there is no rule saying that interest lines up with mine or with yours.

A hedged answer about my hair costs nothing. The same mechanism on a decision that matters is a different thing entirely.

Jimmy Carr says AI is a musical instrument, that anyone can sit at a piano but it takes practice to get a symphony instead of noise. I keep going back to that, and the part I had not fully taken in is that an instrument never decides what to play.

So you have to drive. In practice that is small and boring and it works.

Ask it to argue the other side. Ask it to advise you on the trade-offs. Ask it what you are not seeing. Tell it plainly that you want the answer you will not like.

And when it tells you that you are right, notice. That is the moment to be most careful, not the least.