Talk to Me Like I am AI

I was in a conversation recently where references were made that I didn’t understand. There simply wasn’t enough background for me to find a reference point. My only honest response was, “I’m not sure what you are referring to.”

It reminded me of the cinematic plea: “Talk to me like I’m a three-year-old.” The intent, of course, is not condescension, but a desire for the bedrock of clarity. It is a request to remove assumptions and fill in the missing pieces.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about a variation of that idea: Talk to me like I am AI.

Not because I lack intelligence, but because I lack your history.

Artificial intelligence, specifically the Large Language Models we now inhabit, is no different. It is an immense library without a private index. It can only respond to the horizon of the context we provide. Without sufficient context, the machine still produces an answer, but that answer misses the mark—not from a lack of capability, but from a lack of shared understanding.

In that sense, the machine is a mirror of us.

Much of what we call miscommunication is not a disagreement of facts, but a ghosting of context. We move through the world assuming shared references that may not exist, or are perceived through a different lens. We skip steps. We fill in blanks with assumptions that serve us, but leave the other person in the dark.

When context is present, conversations tend to resolve into meaning. When it is absent, they drift into noise, or worse, lead to the friction of being merely heard but never truly known.

Working with AI has made this very apparent to me. The quality of its response is a direct reflection of the clarity of my soul’s input. There is an idea in linguistics that the meaning of communication is the response we get. I’m beginning to see that not as a theory, but as an observable truth. The response reveals what was understood, and just as often, what was left behind.

That observation extends far beyond our machines.

Clarity is not a process of simplification; it is an act of generosity. It is the willingness to draw the map so that another person might actually stand where you are standing. Context is the difference between an echo and an encounter.

This is something I’ve been exploring more deeply in my work with artificial intelligence.