What is the "I" in AI? · Clief Notes

What is the "I" in AI?

Jake Van Clief’s lesson Beyond the Turing Test gave me a useful way to think about AI and my relationship with it, especially his idea that we are beginning to recognize the “I” in AI.

We tend to talk about AI as though the important thing happening is INSIDE the model: the training, the architecture, the parameters, the reasoning, the intelligence itself. But that view leaves out half of what is actually happening when a person works with AI over time.

The output is not produced by the model in isolation. It is produced within an ongoing exchange between a particular human and a particular system. As those exchanges accumulate, they begin to form patterns that the human recognizes, expects, corrects, and increasingly relies upon.

That is where Jake Van Clief’s idea of the “I” in AI becomes particularly interesting.

When he writes, “We are starting to recognize the ‘I’ in ‘AI,’” the “I” does not mean a hidden human level of understanding emerging inside the machine. It points instead to something created through the interaction itself.

The ‘I’ is what takes shape through the relationship formed by repeated interaction.

When I write a prompt to Claude (read: any AI), I review the output based on my own expectations. I have a pretty good idea of how it is going to respond based on previous interactions. I know when things are “flowing” well. I know when something is “off.”

Have you ever screamed at your AI model, “WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM TODAY?” What that really means is, “This doesn't match the pattern I expect."

You know what to expect because you have experienced repeated patterns of responses. And over time, those repeated interactions create something recognizable. Think: human + model + accumulated context + feedback + corrections + preferences + shared vocabulary + memory + working methods. Remove one important part and the pattern changes.

That is the essence of Jake’s “gravity" in the lesson.

The AI has its own structure, training, strengths, and limitations, but the result is not produced in a vacuum. The person brings interpretation, direction, timing, purpose, and taste.

The “I” is not hidden inside the artificial intelligence. It becomes visible in the relationship with it.

That is why two people can use the same model and experience it very differently. One person may push for evidence while another values creativity. One may immediately recognize weak reasoning while another may focus more on the usefulness of the result. Over time, those differences accumulate.

Jake predicted that people would notice when a familiar system changes, even when they cannot immediately explain the difference. That is what we are nearing, if not already experiencing to some degree.

This is why the phrase “human in the loop” can feel too small. It suggests a person standing outside an automated process, checking the machine’s work. But in sustained AI use, the human is not merely supervising the loop. The human is helping define it.

That may be the clearest way to understand the “I” in AI. It is the accumulated human influence carried through repeated interaction until the relationship itself becomes recognizable.

Jake states it directly near the end of the lesson: if AI makes the human more valuable, and each person develops a unique relationship with a particular AI, then the combination becomes something new: “the specific gravity of one person's thinking amplified by one system's architecture.”

That is the “I” in AI.

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What is the "I" in AI?