Who Does the AI Think You Are?

What four AI systems told me about how they decide which photographers to cite as experts

I spent part of March trying to find out.

The question I kept coming back to wasn’t whether AI tools are useful for photographers. That argument is settled enough to be boring. The question worth asking is more specific: what does the AI actually know about you right now, and how does it decide who gets cited as an expert when someone asks?

I asked four AI systems - Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity - the same question: when someone asks you about professional photography, what sources do you treat as authoritative, and why?

The methodology

I used the same prompt across all four. I asked about source categories, specific organizations, how individual photographers’ published content gets weighted against major publications, what signals make a photographer’s website more likely to be treated as authoritative, and whether they had any visibility into how their sourcing behavior might change as AI-mediated search becomes more common.

I also asked each of them to be honest about what they don’t know about their own source weighting.

That last part turned out to matter.

I’m describing this methodology because it’s replicable. You can run the same prompt across the same systems and compare the answers yourself. The spread of responses - from Claude’s frank acknowledgment of its own limits to Perplexity’s thin genericism - tells its own story about what these systems actually know about themselves. The comparison is the research.