I Asked AI To Dress Me for a Week

What was I thinking?

I thought of my user experience with ChatGPT thus far. The promising idea that my eighteen-month-old AI will immediately turn out essays in a very literary style of a storywriter turned out to be nothing more than wishful thinking.

On second-thought, looking through my closet and seeing a lot of nothing to wear, what do I have to lose? And who knows? The Simpsons may well just have predicted the future, once again, as Ralph Wiggum unwittingly observed, “It’s fun to obey the machine!”

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It is settled then. I’ll have AI pick out my outfit. I asked for elegant. It gave me this:

Elegant and sophisticated are not one and the same. Anyways, not my style.

Then I asked for casual and it returned this.

Timeless, effortless, laid-back, trendy, comfortable, versatile … still not groundbreaking. And casual, not so much the outfit as out. Size things up by looking at the tags, for example: see “fit” on clothing labels or else you just have instructions on something to do other than with clothes: #OOTD, #GTFO.

Clearly we are on different wavelengths. If I want to convey my sense of personal style in the artificial and intelligent manner of AI, I’d better learn to speak chatbot.

That was an intelligent statement.

Why, thank you!

Hold on a sec. Was ChatGPT being sarcastic?

In any case, it just goes to show our vast need as a society for an irony font of sarcast typeface. Let’s work on that, and get it done stat. In the meanwhile, I found a work-around through ordinary conversation. We read a room by noting the tone of voice and body language of other people. A knowing glance, a gesture of kindness, or accompanying arched eyebrow give context clues. In other words, we use the linguistic context of visual information to be clear. If you catch my drift, then probably you already envisaged a way of making myself plain to AI.