Verified by 
Artificial Intelligence
AI Blinked: Profiling Belinda Blumenthal
The first AI profile of the Steele's Pots & Pans Team
Posted February 14, 2019
tl;dr I used artificial intelligence to profile the characters of the Belinda Blinked series.
Who am I and, dear god, what have I done?
I'm Dr. Jen Golbeck, computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, social media expert, Professor at the University of Maryland in the College of Information Studies, and big fan of MDWAP. I create artificial intelligence algorithms that analyze people's data to create profiles of them.
I decided to use this technology to profile the characters in the Belinda Blinked novels.
It's worse in print: getting the data
I bought all four Belinda Blinked Kindle books from Amazon, murdering my recommendations for weeks. I read each book and, I can assure you, they are far worse in print than they seem on the podcast.
To profile the characters, we needed to compile everything they said or thought in their own voice. Three very sweet people – Laura Caley, Eleanor, and Brinn – volunteered to help me, and we each took a book. We extracted anything that characters spoke aloud, things they wrote (rare), and things they thought to themselves if Rocky wrote it as though they were speaking ("Sorry God").
Artificial Intelligence may be dumber after analyzing this text
I took all the things each character said and fed that into a set of artificial intelligence algorithms that profile people based on words they speak or write. We used IBM Watson Personality Insights, Apply Magic Sauce from Cambridge University, and AnalyzeWords and LIWC, both tools from the University of Texas.
Before we jump into the profiles, know that artificial intelligence is actually kind of dumb sometimes. It gets things wrong often, so these profiles will be interesting for where they are off as much as where they nail it.
Profile 1: Belinda Blumenthal
According to Apply Magic Sauce's analysis of Belinda's text, she is 29 years old. She speaks in an androgynous style but slightly more masculine. They claim "you're probably male but don't repress your feminine side".
She's close to the 50th percentile for all the Big Five personality traits, including openness to new experiences (conservative/traditional vs liberal/artistic), conscientiousness (impulsive vs. organized), extraversion (contemplative vs. engaged with the outside world), and neuroticism (laid back vs. stressed). This could mean Belinda really embodies both ends of the spectrum on most traits...or it could mean that Rocky's writing is so bad that it's impossible to get any sense of her personality from the text. On Agreeableness, a personality trait that measures whether you're competitive vs. team focused, she scores in the 37thpercentile, closer to competitive.
What would the Glee Team have to say about that?
IBM Watson, frankly, struggled a bit. It offered this tidbit in their summary: "You are relatively unconcerned with both taking pleasure in life and achieving success. You prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment." It successfully predicted she was "likely to volunteer for social causes" (Asses & Donkeys Trust!) and got it right with, "experiences that give a sense of prestige hold some appeal to you." It missed the mark by saying she was "unlikely to prefer style when buying clothes" (clearly, IBM has not seen her riding outfit).
All of their insights are shown below in this beautiful sunburst, where the % values show percentiles (99% indicates she exhibits the trait more strongly than 99% of the population, where low values mean a trait is less common in her than most people). Hedonism is shockingly low (14%) for someone of Belinda's habits. If 86% of people are MORE hedonistic than Belinda, I am even more naive about the world than I thought. Similarly, her Modesty score is far too high.
Conclusion: Belinda is far too complex a woman to be profiled successfully by something as crude as artificial intelligence.
Alternate conclusion: Rocky is a really terrible writer who does not capture her personality at all in the 473 lines he wrote for her across the 4 books.
Up next: Bella and Giselle.
Later: The Dutchess, Tony, Peter, Jim, and Des.
(Everyone else said so little that it's impossible to profile them)
References
If you want to read more about my work in this space in a science-y way, check out my Google Scholar page with links to all my peer-reviewed published academic work. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=WBOnL7sAAAAJ&hl=en
