AI. Identity. The human life.
More than
a prediction.
What happens when a machine remembers
your life—and you keep changing?
01 / The idea
To be understood.
And free to change.
A machine can collect the details of a life: our words, decisions, habits and hopes. But those details are always an incomplete picture.
Unpredicted explores a different ambition for personal AI: understanding that can be questioned, corrected and changed by the person it describes.
It began with one person’s experiment. It is growing into a book, research and a series of conversations.
An idea to explore
Understanding has
to keep moving.
A memory becomes an interpretation.
A correction should change it.
An illustrative interaction.
A concept for the planned personal AI prototype.
Something you said
“I do my best thinking alone.”
A useful memory. One moment, in one context.
A record of your words02 / The research
Being known
is an open question.
The research ambition is to make a machine’s understanding of a person visible, revisable and accountable to them.
01Memory with context
Something you said a year ago may still matter. It may also have changed. How should a system distinguish a lasting preference from a passing feeling?
The question: what should it remember, and when should it ask again?
02Understanding with evidence
An interpretation can sound convincing and still be wrong. A personal AI should be able to show what it is drawing on, where it is uncertain, and what might contradict its view.
The question: can you see—and challenge—how it arrived at its understanding?
03Agency through correction
A person needs the power to say “that isn’t me”, to change their mind, and to ask for something to be forgotten. Those choices should change how the system responds.
The question: does correcting the model improve what happens next?
A ten-person prototype to test whether a changing understanding can lead to more useful responses.
Small enough to listen closely.03 / The book
The life behind
the data.
A human life, remembered by a machine.
A book taking shape from my own experiment with AI: the useful observations, the confident misunderstandings, and the experience of seeing a version of yourself reflected back.
What does it mean to feel understood? What happens when the interpretation is wrong? And how do you keep authorship of your own life?
Manuscript in development.
04 / The conversations
Twenty-seven
conversations.
Room for surprise.
A planned series exploring memory, identity and human agency in the age of AI. Bringing lived experience into the same conversation as technology.
Series in developmentA conversation begins here
When did you last
surprise yourself?
Three questions shaping the series. Take your time.
From the experiment
N = 1The stale dog biscuit problem.
My AI found a story about grief in an old dog biscuit.
There was one problem. Missy was downstairs.
05 / Behind the project
An engineer’s curiosity.
A very human experiment.
I’m Leigh-Ann Russell. I began using AI as a journal. Over time, it became a place for reflections, decisions and the details of everyday life.
The more it remembered, the more revealing its misunderstandings became. Unpredicted grows from that experience—and a question I haven’t finished asking:
What would it mean for a machine to know a human without trapping them inside what it knows?Leigh-Ann Russell