What Does Your AI Know About You?
Just Ask!
Last week, my husband Mark and I were having dinner with friends Phil and Barbie when the topic of AI came up. As a college professor, I have lots of thoughts and very mixed feelings. On one hand, AI has transformed the education landscape in exciting ways, and teaching our students about effective prompt engineering will expand their knowledge base in unimaginable ways. On the other hand, I worry that the use of generative AI may stunt my students' critical thinking skills and increase cheating.
When it comes to assignments in my interpersonal communication class, I confessed to my friends that I want to read about my students' personal experiences and insights—not AI's suggestions, revisions, or hallucinations. As Brooke Warner recently wrote in AI Will Change Everything, and It Already Is, we can’t go back in time. I'm excited for AI's future, but when it comes to the development of one's writing skills, AI is a mixed bag for teachers and publishers alike.
Then Phil and his wife Barbie jumped into the conversation and blew my mind. "Have you asked your AI what it knows about you?" Phil asked.
"You should try it," Barbie added. She explained that she uses ChatGPT regularly for work, and when she asked "Chatty" that question, it gave her an extensive answer. In addition to describing her professional tasks, she said ChatGPT provided a detailed analysis of her leadership style.
"Did it bother you that ChatGPT tracks your usage in such a detailed way?" I asked.
"No," she answered. "I've come to think of AI as my work partner. The fact that it knows me so well means that it gives me exactly the kind of support I'm looking for. It just gets better and better."
Barbie manages grants, projects, and people at a large utility company. She described the ways that AI has transformed her work life and increased her efficiency. As Barbie spoke, I was reminded of a video I saw by Jeremy Utley, a Stanford University professor, who argues that AI is the best team member any of us could hope to have.
I appreciated Barbie's perspective, but the conversation left me feeling uneasy. Why did her enthusiasm about AI knowing her so intimately make me uncomfortable? I wondered about the extent to which AI tracked me and whether I wanted that level of digital intimacy. When I ask AI a question, I typically turn to Claude. So, the next day I asked Claude, "What do you know about me?" This was Claude's answer:
I don't know anything about you personally. Each conversation I have starts fresh without any information about who I'm talking to or any previous conversations we might have had.
I can see that you're located in Dorado, PR based on the system information, but beyond that, I don't have any details about your background, interests, or personal information.
Is there something specific you'd like to share or talk about? I'm here to help with whatever questions or projects you might have.
These differences reinforced that LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT use different protocols when it comes to tracking client data.
When I asked Claude to explain the differences between my experience and my friend Barbie's experience, it replied:
ChatGPT appears to retain and analyze user data across sessions to build profiles, while Claude operates with conversation-level privacy. This reflects fundamentally different design philosophies about user privacy versus personalization.
ChatGPT and Claude are just two examples of commonly used LLMs. Others include Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Meta's Llama family, and more. Whichever LLM you use, I think it's worth investigating how privacy and tracking occur. It also makes good sense to consider your own preferences when it comes to AI and privacy. Then, I encourage you to ask the AI you rely on: "What do you know about me?"
Did you take my advice? Did you ask the AI you use, "What do you know about me?" Were you surprised by the answer? Or, do you have thoughts on AI you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments below. I'd love to hear from you!
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Additional AI resources for teachers and students:
1) For more on the way AI is impacting the college classroom, check out the videos series: Practical AI for Instructors and Students Part 1: Introduction to AI for Teachers and Students by Wharton Interactive's Faculty Director Ethan Mollick and Director of Pedagogy Lilach Mollick. They provide an overview of how large language models (LLMs) work and explain how this latest generation of models has impacted how we work and how we learn.