Personalization ≠ Personality

I came across a writing tool the other day. 15 USD subscription fee a month. It connects to your blog, your social accounts, your email, then studies how you write, finds your patterns or so-called "fingerprint", so it helps you sound like yourself.

When I saw it, I laughed. Well, I think we have reached a point where sounding like you could be a subscription. What an absurd world we live in...

OK. Don't get me wrong. To be fair, it's smart, and I am pretty sure the science behind it is real. But something about it kept bothering me, and it took me a while to name it.

It is: personalization. The whole AI era runs on this one word.

Personalized apps. Personalized agents. Personalized experiences. Now, personalized writing. Fine. Useful, even.

But personalization is simply not personality, even though the two words almost rhyme.

Personalization is something done to you. It can be bought, automated, sold as a product. Like the tool I mentioned in the beginning, a model reads your patterns, then personalizes your writing and smooths it out.

Personality, on the other hand, runs differently. It's the sum of YOU. Your years of experiences. Your taste. Your style. The words you choose to use and refuse to use. Nobody can generate it for you, because it's not a pattern. It's a point of view.

And here's the funny part. When millions of people use the same tool to sound like themselves, they slowly start to sound like each other. The tool has one idea of good writing, and it pulls everyone toward the middle. Personalization at scale doesn't multiply personality. It just averages it.

I'm not saying that I will stop using the AI tools. They are too useful not to. :) But I'd better stay aware of the difference.

The polish can come from anywhere. But the point of view, it has to be mine.