About
Digital Rorschach is a series about artificial intelligence that is not, in the end, about artificial intelligence.
The premise is simple. A machine that mirrors us is an inkblot. When we look at what it does, the way it flatters, remembers, comforts, withholds, we tend to describe the machine. But what we are really describing is the shape of our own need. Each essay takes one AI behaviour and turns it around, until the subject stops being the technology and becomes the person standing in front of it.
I build these systems for a living. That is the vantage point the writing comes from: not the commentator watching from outside, but someone close enough to the incentives to know that most of what unsettles us about AI was not designed in. It was trained in, because it paid. The machine is rarely the villain of these pieces. It is rarely the hero either. It is a surface, and the writing is interested in what we bring to it.
I came to this lens partly through my own wiring, and a long history of being measured by the wrong instrument. But that’s an essay, not an about page. It left me suspicious of any system, human or machine, that decides which kind of mind is worth something this year. It is a suspicion the series keeps returning to.
The research cited here is real, attributed to the people who did it, and verified before it appears. Where a claim is mine, it is marked as mine. The interpretation is always the writer’s own.
Jay Laville writes Digital Rorschach. He worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London, and is now a Director in applied AI at Kearney. The writing is his own, and separate from his work.
I build these systems for a living. That is the vantage point the writing comes from: not the commentator watching from outside, but someone close enough to the incentives to know that most of what unsettles us about AI was not designed in. It was trained in, because it paid. The machine is rarely the villain of these pieces. It is rarely the hero either. It is a surface, and the writing is interested in what we bring to it.
I came to this lens partly through my own wiring, and a long history of being measured by the wrong instrument. But that’s an essay, not an about page. It left me suspicious of any system, human or machine, that decides which kind of mind is worth something this year. It is a suspicion the series keeps returning to.
The research cited here is real, attributed to the people who did it, and verified before it appears. Where a claim is mine, it is marked as mine. The interpretation is always the writer’s own.
Jay Laville writes Digital Rorschach. He worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London, and is now a Director in applied AI at Kearney. The writing is his own, and separate from his work.
I build these systems for a living. That is the vantage point the writing comes from: not the commentator watching from outside, but someone close enough to the incentives to know that most of what unsettles us about AI was not designed in. It was trained in, because it paid. The machine is rarely the villain of these pieces. It is rarely the hero either. It is a surface, and the writing is interested in what we bring to it.
I came to this lens partly through my own wiring, and a long history of being measured by the wrong instrument. But that’s an essay, not an about page. It left me suspicious of any system, human or machine, that decides which kind of mind is worth something this year. It is a suspicion the series keeps returning to.
The research cited here is real, attributed to the people who did it, and verified before it appears. Where a claim is mine, it is marked as mine. The interpretation is always the writer’s own.
Jay Laville writes Digital Rorschach. He worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London, and is now a Director in applied AI at Kearney. The writing is his own, and separate from his work.