AI First Contact: The Day You Met AI Without Realizing It
By Jereme Peabody
Before ChatGPT ever spoke to you, AI was already shaping your habits, emotions, and attention. Understanding AI First Contact explains everything about how generative AI behaves today.
Most people think their AI First Contact was typing into ChatGPT for the first time.
In reality, you met AI years ago.
But AI looked very different back then.
When the Feed Started Acting Like It Knew You
Your AI first contact was likely as far back as 2006 with Facebook's News Feed.
Social media started rolling out these algorithms years ago to keep you engaged.
It would learn what you liked, learned from your behavior, and present you with another post, picture, or news article.
They seemed harmless, helpful even.
But they've been around for a while:
- Facebook's News Feed (2006)
- YouTube's Watch Next (2010)
- Instagram's Explore tab (2012)
- TikTok's For You Page (2016)
- Twitter's engagement ranking (2023)
The Facebook News Feed shifted how we consume our news.
It influenced political polarization through its algorithm and posed mental health risks due to increased use.
The Feed would reinforce your world view by inadvertently separating all other news away from you.
It became an echo chamber.
And others used it to promote hate and spread misinformation.
It became a weapon.
Recommendation Algorithms
These social media recommendation algorithms are still being used today.
While they're positioned to make things convenient for us, they are behavioral prediction engines under the hood.
This is how social media algorithms work. Their job is to predict your behavior.
They're designed to tap into what interests you.
They introduce you to new ideas to see how you respond. You become part of their prediction engine and train them on your use.
Continuously feeding you, and you continuously feeding it.
We fed it for nearly 17 years. Then in 2023, AI evolved.
From Predicting Your Click to Predicting Your Thought
In 2023, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. ChatGPT is a generative AI trained on a large language model (LLM).
It's a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content by learning patterns from existing data.
Generative AI uses the same core trick as social media: prediction.
But instead of predicting the next video or post, it predicts the next words in a conversation.
- “What would a helpful response look like?”
- “What emotional tone should I mirror?”
- “What direction does the user seem to be leaning?”
- “What next idea keeps the conversation flowing?”
And just like social media algorithms, it learns what you like to give you content that will keep you engaged.
Sound familiar?
The Ground Truth
If you want to understand modern AI to be safe, not just use it, explore the rest of GetGroundedAI.
You'll learn how systems like ChatGPT actually work, how to avoid oversharing, how to recognize misleading responses, and how to stay in control of your information every time you interact with an AI.
Start with the next article: How AI Echoes Your Emotions (and Why That Matters).