Our souls are shockingly visible in even our most banal work emails, it seems.
That's true, at least, if you're a supercomputer like IBM Watson. The sophisticated artificial intelligence machine launched a new website that takes 100-word chunks of text -- memos, emails, tweets or Facebook status updates -- and analyzes them to describe the personality of the person who wrote them.
Here's how it works: you cut some text from an email, tweet, speech or Facebook status update, and paste it into the little box provided on the website. It then gives you three analytical results: a short written description of the person's personality and character, a breakdown of their personality by the percentage of certain qualities, like openness, melancholy and "self-transcendence" -- and a graph with every quality described.
We were eager to try it.
One problem we ran into is that most of our work emails are too short to be of any use -- "yup," "cool," and "kk, got it" don't go very far in flinging open the doors to one's psyche.
So we checked using the text written by other people. Our first candidate: Taylor Swift.
The ultimate kickass businesswoman writes a lot, which gave us plenty of material. We chose her seminal letter to Apple.
Not everyone may agree with Watson's analysis, which labels Swift as "compulsive." The site does, however, give her high points for adventurousness, rating her 63% on that measure -- surely true of a fearless songwriter and musician.
Spot the misanthrope
A good tip: when you plug in the text, remember to scroll down, to where the graph is. Here's the eerily accurate numerical Watson analysis of one of our most brilliant friends, who is gifted with infinite curiosity but is also a dedicated misanthrope.
A handy tool
Donald Trump, similarly, gets a bit of a pass from Watson, which praises him as "heartfelt" even as a theory gains popular acceptance that his campaign for the presidency is high-level performance art.
@NaomiOhReally @moorehn @AndrewWNewton Trump telling Univision CEO to stay off his Miami golf course pic.twitter.com/oLcxngmg0w— Dave Clark (@DaveClark_AFP) July 27, 2015
On another speech, however, Watson gets a bit closer to the Trump we can recognize.
@j_tkronk Here's his announcement speech. pic.twitter.com/RXheHrrt76— Conor Sen (@conorsen) July 27, 2015
Watson fared better with a recent memo from Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, who is known for his rebellious attitude towards the media world, but still values his reputation highly.
It did not take long, however, for users to test Watson with the attempt to analyze the more evil minds in history.
@moorehn @AndrewWNewton I put in a 1919 letter from Hitler explaining his anti-Semitic agenda to a well-wisher pic.twitter.com/sbYImKYmbS— Dave Clark (@DaveClark_AFP) July 27, 2015