7 Personality Traits That Make You Immune to AI Hype

Which one are you?

Contrary to popular belief, AI hype feeds on personality, not stupidity.

If you’re uniquely immune to it, it’s not because other people are idiots but because constant exaggeration is tiring, annoying, or irrelevant for a specific type of person. Your type of person.

Below are 7 personality traits that make someone immune to AI hype. Which one are you?

1. Low openness to experience

Low openness to experience is associated with cultural conservatism, which means that you like the status quo and dislike progress (meaning changes).

But I don’t agree with low openness being unquestionably bad, despite what any psychology book would have you believe.

Being “closed” to generative AI is ok.

It means you prefer routine, structure, or simply things that function as expected. How bad is it that AI systems work spectacularly at times yet fail regularly instead of being boringly reliable?

For you, that’s unacceptable. You don’t like unpredictable performance in your software applications, as you don’t like it in your love life.

In a way, given that the human brain is a surprise minimizer, you’re the best adapted among us. Congratulations if this is why you dislike ChatGPT.

2. Low need for cognitive closure

This is a philosopher’s favorite.

You can happily sit with not knowing. You’re allergic to hype but for reasons other than the usual. It’s annoying, yes, but what you profoundly dislike is that it hints at a weakness.

Hype aims to resolve the tension of uncertainty: “AI will fix it,” “AI will do it better,” “AI is the future,” “AI is the solution to all your problems.” It gives people closure where they should have questions instead: “Can AI fix this better than other solutions?”

You’re suspicious of that need for cognitive closure. To you, the biggest questions should remain open and those who try to desperately close them don’t do it because they’re in possession of some deep truth, but because they’re afraid.

2. High disagreeableness

If you read me regularly, you know this is me.

I hear OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claim that his company will build artificial general intelligence—an AI smarter than the average human or the smartest human or smarter than all humans together (it depends on which day of the week you ask them)—in the next two years, and I immediately doubt it.

I hear Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei say that AI will take up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years, and I immediately doubt it.

I update my beliefs more contrary to claims by experts than in favor of them. Because I know these claims are primarily made in the service of vested interests. If those interests seem to be opposed to mine, then doubting the claims is the sane thing to do.

I’m not a default contrarian, you see, I am a first-principles contrarian. Equally annoying but more often correct.

4. Intellectual humility

The “I don’t know” camp. This is the trait I would like to be known for, alas, I’m not humble or modest.

The responsible kind of AI skeptics—the ones I once touted as “the most important opposition group in the modern world”—stand out for being intellectually humble.

They don’t obey the flow of money, they don’t pursue fame, they don’t get stuck on alluring headlines… they think, they do science, they write with no rhetorical intentions. They respect those who opine differently and calmly expose their arguments.

In short, they are immune to hype because their existence is untouched by it. They walk this Earth like folklore spirits, too pure to be taunted by evil energy.

(There’s a different kind of skeptic who’s deeply touched by hype’s evil energy and reacts by opposing it, which sadly spoils their thoughts just as much as it does to the most ardent AI influencer, just in the other direction; updating x(-10) when you see a clickbait headline is as bad as updating x10.)

5. Low neuroticism + High autonomy

Perhaps the most important trait to have as a young graduate about to enter the rough sea that is the labor market right now.

You keep calm and learn to navigate the situation by yourself. You don’t experience life as a constant emergency (with or without AI), which makes you less vulnerable to anything that promises to save you from one.

You don’t need me to tell you the golden rule of using AI because you already follow it instinctively:

All tools must enhance, never erode, your most important one—your mind. Be curious about AI, but also examine how it shapes your habits and your thinking patterns.

You don’t care about hype, but you don’t deny the value of AI either. You are the perfect subject to embody the new triad of qualities that will be key in the short-term future: imagination x agency x taste.

Keep going.

6. Existential minimalism

You are the anti-optimization person in your group of friends.

You don’t dislike AI or hype, but something more profound that spoiled AI itself long ago: the perpetual search for progress, at all costs, not as a means to an end but an end in itself.

You like some parts of modernity—medicine, perhaps, also yoga—but are existentially opposite to Silicon Valley’s need to escape forward. You live in this world as it is instead of dreaming about one that doesn’t exist or planning the design of how it ought to be.

You enjoy nature, animals, your tribe (family, friends), and having fun. You romanticize the past because it was simpler; less rush for everything, less haste even if you know it was also rougher (sometimes you don’t know).

Slow, quiet, ordinary, and imperfect are some of your favorite adjectives.

In a way, AI hype is irrelevant to you; you only oppose it insofar as it is an instance of this constant hyperoptimization of life.

7. Bullshit intolerance

This is the emotional and visceral version of high disagreeableness. The type I'm happy not to be.

The loudest skeptics—those who shout in social media: “BUT CAN’T YOU SEE THAT THEY’RE LYING TO YOU!!!!1”—are intolerant to bullshit. So much so that they often miss the value of AI—as small as they may think it is—blinded by the anger that the exaggeration of that value instills in them.

Personally, I can’t stand this trait even though I understand the frustration.

One reason is they’re loud. The other is that anger is not the best friend of truth, but truth remains a requirement for rightful anger; if you’re angry and wrong, you look like the idiot.

If you belong here, I recommend you shift to one of the other traits.

Become an Amish or a yogi to be 6, adaptable to be 5, humble to be 4, impassible to be 3, introspective to be 2, or a routine-lover to be 1.

Good luck.

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