I recently asked an AI system to review a sample of my older writing and consider what it might reveal about my psychological orientation. There is an obvious paradox in doing this. Artificial intelligence was being used to analyse work that I had written before generative AI became part of my creative and professional life. This distinction mattered to me.
The material consisted of six substantial documents and a selection of professional messages written between 2018 and 2020. Together, the documents amounted to nearly 39,000 words. They included academic papers, community-media reports, funding proposals, reflective blogs, conference papers, project evaluations, and correspondence with collaborators.
The files were written and last modified before the public emergence of ChatGPT and the widespread adoption of generative AI. Their metadata identified me as the author. They therefore offered a reasonably stable record of how I wrote, organised ideas, and communicated before AI-assisted drafting became available.
The purpose of the exercise was not to prove who I am through a personality label. Nor was it to turn writing style into a form of psychological diagnosis. It was to look backwards and ask a more modest question:
What patterns were already present in my work before AI entered the picture?
INFJ, INTJ and the Intuitive Orientation
The analysis compared my writing with two personality orientations from the Myers–Briggs tradition: INFJ and INTJ. Both types are associated with introverted intuition. In Jungian terms, introverted intuition is concerned with underlying patterns, symbolic connections, emerging possibilities, and the deeper direction in which events appear to be moving. This part of the analysis was relatively straightforward.
Across very different kinds of writing, I tend to move beneath the immediate subject and look for the pattern that connects it with something larger. A discussion about digital inclusion becomes a question about belonging. A community-radio project becomes an exploration of voice, recognition, and agency. A study of radio presentation becomes an inquiry into archetypes and the collective unconscious. A podcast conversation becomes a possible site of care, reflection, and psychological development.
The surface topic matters, but I rarely seem content to leave it on the surface.
The more difficult question was whether this intuitive orientation is better understood as INFJ or INTJ. The distinction is sometimes presented too crudely as one between feeling and logic. That is not particularly helpful. INFJs can be highly analytical, while INTJs can be deeply committed to personal and ethical values. The more revealing question is what the analysis is ultimately for.
Is thought primarily being organised to improve systems, achieve objectives, and increase external effectiveness? Or is it being organised to improve relationships, deepen recognition, and create more meaningful forms of participation?
My older writing contains plenty of strategy. It develops frameworks, stages, evaluation processes, objectives, policy arguments, and institutional proposals. This explains why INTJ remains a plausible interpretation.
Yet the strategy almost always appears to serve a relational purpose.
The desired outcome is not simply a better-functioning system. It is a system in which people can speak, participate, belong, develop, and recognise themselves.
That difference led to the provisional conclusion that INFJ is the better fit.
The Recurring Pattern
Several themes appeared repeatedly across the material. The first was the relationship between voice and agency.
In my community-media work, having a voice is rarely treated as the simple ability to transmit information. Voice is connected with social recognition. People become more capable of acting when they can describe their experiences, hear themselves reflected, and participate in the decisions that shape their lives.
The second theme was belonging. My paper about digital inclusion argued that people cannot meaningfully engage with systems if they do not feel welcome within them. What may appear to an administrator as reluctance, resistance, or a lack of skill may be a rational response to a system that does not recognise the participant’s experience or worldview.
This remains important to my thinking. Before asking why someone has failed to engage, I am inclined to ask what kind of relationship the institution has established with them.
The third theme was care. In my notes on podcasting as therapy, I explored the possibility that recorded conversation might offer more than content for an audience. Sitting around microphones, listening to one another, and finding words for partially formed thoughts can be meaningful for the participants themselves.
The podcast is not merely a product. It is an encounter.
The fourth theme was symbolic interpretation. My writing about the archetypal role of the DJ questioned whether familiar forms of radio presentation should be understood only as products of broadcasting conventions and global media industries. I wanted to know whether the presenter might also embody older figures: the guide, the companion, the trickster, the storyteller, the messenger, or the keeper of a shared emotional space.
This is characteristic of how I approach media. I am interested in what a form of communication does, but also in what it symbolises and what psychological role it plays.
Finally, there was a persistent effort to bring meaning and structure together. My writing does not reject planning, measurement, policy, or evaluation. It repeatedly tries to place them within a more humane account of social life. The question is not whether outcomes should be measured, but whether we are measuring what genuinely matters.
What Readers Can Expect
This reflection may help readers understand what to expect from my writing, photography, podcasts, radio programmes, and other media work. I am unlikely to treat a subject as an isolated event.
A journey may become a reflection on identity, memory, place, and cultural encounter. A piece of music may suggest an emotional landscape or a structure of feeling. A political controversy may reveal a deeper disturbance in belonging and social recognition. A radio programme may become a symbolic journey without declaring itself to be one.
This also means that my work will often cross boundaries. I may move between media studies, Jungian psychology, symbolic interactionism, cultural criticism, public policy, personal reflection, music, photography, and everyday observation. These connections are not intended to collapse every subject into one grand theory. They are attempts to notice how different parts of life illuminate one another.
Readers can also expect a concern with those who are overlooked by dominant systems. I am interested in the person who does not fit the administrative category, the audience member who is not represented by the mainstream narrative, the volunteer whose knowledge is difficult to quantify, and the community whose experience cannot be reduced to a dataset.
This does not mean that every account or feeling must be accepted without question. Recognition is not the suspension of judgement. It is the willingness to understand a position before deciding what to make of it.
The Limitations of This Orientation
The analysis was not entirely flattering, nor should it have been. Intuitive and integrative writing can become dense. The desire to establish every connection may obscure the central point. A useful insight can be surrounded by so much context that readers have to work too hard to find it. There is also a risk of enlarging the frame beyond what a project can reasonably hold.
A radio workshop can become connected with education, wellbeing, democracy, community development, psychological growth, social policy, and cultural renewal. These connections may all be meaningful, but they do not all need to be carried by every piece of work.
The relational orientation also brings a danger of over-responsibility. Convening people, protecting participation, maintaining a network, articulating the larger vision, and translating it into practical activity can become exhausting when one person assumes responsibility for holding everything together.
Finally, intuitive frameworks can become self-confirming. Once a pattern has been recognised, it is easy to interpret every new piece of evidence as another expression of it. The corrective is contact with the particular. What actually happened? What did someone really say? What can be observed? What evidence would challenge the interpretation? What is the next practical action?
These questions do not diminish imagination. They give it somewhere to stand.
What AI Changes – and What It Does Not
AI now plays a part in some of my writing and research processes. It can help organise material, test structures, compare interpretations, identify repetition, and turn an extensive body of notes into something more manageable. It can also produce polished language with unsettling ease.
That makes it important to distinguish between assistance and orientation. AI may help shape a paragraph, but it does not determine why I am interested in belonging, voice, care, cultural memory, or symbolic meaning. The archival exercise suggests that these concerns were present before generative AI entered my working life.
They can be seen in the questions I asked, the projects I developed, the arguments I pursued, and the messages I sent to collaborators. AI did not introduce those patterns. At most, it has made them easier to identify, organise, and sometimes overproduce.
The responsibility remains mine: to decide what is worth saying, what evidence supports it, what should be left out, and whether the finished work reflects something I genuinely believe.
A Provisional Description
If I had to summarise the analysis, I would describe my orientation as intuition-led, relationally grounded, analytical, and strategically capable. Within the Myers–Briggs framework, that points more towards INFJ than INTJ, but it does not eliminate the INTJ characteristics visible in my work. The systems thinking, independence, critical analysis, and desire for coherent structures are real. The difference is one of purpose.
- I generally want structures to work because of what they make possible between people.
- I want media to do more than circulate content. I want it to create recognition.
- I want policy to do more than administer categories. I want it to understand lived experience.
- I want creative work to do more than display competence. I want it to open a space in which something previously unexpressed can emerge.
That is not a finished definition of who I am. It is a way of situating the work.
Personality types are maps, and maps are useful precisely because they are not the territory. They help us notice where we tend to travel, where we repeatedly stop, and which paths we may overlook. The important question is not whether I can prove that I am an INFJ or an INTJ.
The more useful question is whether recognising these patterns helps me make work that is clearer, more grounded, more honest, and more attentive to the world beyond my own intuitions. That remains an open journey.
Transparency note: The archival analysis described here used AI to examine writing and correspondence produced between 2018 and 2020, before generative AI became part of my working practice. This article was subsequently developed with AI assistance from that analysis. The interpretations and responsibility for publication remain my own.
Leave a Reply