Your name is raw material: When AI confidently erases you

What does it feel like to watch a machine assemble a stranger and label it you? It is not a minor error. It is a quiet violence. I asked an AI who I am. It gave me four different lives. Four confident, detailed biographies of complete strangers. Readers performed the same test. They typed their own names. The responses were, in their own words, a bit scary. They could not believe the lie told so confidently. This is not a series of glitches. It is a systemic truth.

What happens when the tool designed to know everything knows nothing about you?

The machine operates on a simple, devastating principle. Your identity is not a story to be understood. It is data to be processed. Your name, my name, any name is just raw material. The algorithm scours the digital landscape for fragments. It finds a mention here, a title there, a fragment of context elsewhere. It cannot weigh truth. It cannot discern nuance. It calculates probability. It then assembles a plausible fiction. It presents this fiction with absolute, manufactured certainty. This certainty is its most dangerous product. It is designed to feel true, even when it is hollow.

Why does its confidence feel more like a threat than a mistake?

That “what the heck” feeling you get is the correct response. It is the system failing at its core function right in front of you. It is the moment you witness your own digital erasure. The machine does not see a life lived, sacrifices made, expertise earned. It sees a pattern of words to be replicated. It does not lie with malice. It lies with indifference. This indifference is what chills us. Our complexity is its inconvenience.

When it rewrites your story, what does it steal?

It steals context. It steals legacy. It steals the specific texture of your truth. One reader, reflecting on a separate tragedy, asked a devastating question. What good is a prison sentence if the perpetrator returns to a village that is not prepared to protect the victim? This is the same principle. What good is a digital record if the community of facts is not prepared to protect your truth? The AI’s fabrication is the returning perpetrator. A community—of data, of understanding, of history—that does not guard your true story is complicit in its distortion.

Is your lived experience just background noise in its dataset?

We must state this clearly. Your lived experience is the only audit that matters. The machine’s output is a draft. It is always a draft. It must be met with ruthless verification. Do you recognise this person it describes? Does this story align with the facts you have lived? Your memory, your records, your body of work are the primary sources. The AI is not a source. It is a synthesizer of unknown and unreliable sources. To treat it as anything else is to surrender your narrative authority.

Who holds the pen for your life story?

The solution is not to fix the machine. It is to assert, relentlessly, the primacy of the human source. We must become archivists of our own truth. We must document with purpose. We must speak our own stories with clarity and repetition. We must inject our complex, uncomfortable, real selves back into the digital stream. We must correct the record, not because the machine will learn, but because other humans must see the correction.

Will you outsource your identity to a probability model?

This is the fundamental question. The machine’s function is not to invent, but to reflect and refine. Its value exists only when directed by human expertise. It is a rigorous editor for your ideas, not their author. The raw material, the insight, the lived experience—that is always, and only, yours. The integrity of any conversation depends on this. Expect clarity from your tools, not creation. Demand it.

The error is not personal. It is systemic. Your name is next. My name was just practice. Defend your truth with the precision the system lacks. Your identity is not a data point. It is your authority. Never surrender it.