More than a century ago, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung made introversion and extraversion central to his theory of psychological types.
Today, we tend to use “introvert” and “extrovert” as shorthand for how sociable someone is. Jung’s preferred spelling was “extravert”, and his distinction went considerably further than whether someone enjoys a party or likes to be around others.
Jung’s original distinction raises a question in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI). If people differ in how they naturally orientate themselves towards their inner and outer worlds, should they also use AI differently?
On supporting science journalism
If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
In Psychological Types, published in 1921, Jung described introversion and extraversion as different orientations. He distinguished them by the direction of our interest: towards the subjective, inner world or towards objects and events outside ourselves.
Contemporary personality research does not simply reproduce Jung’s types. Recent studies examining personality and AI generally measure extraversion as one of the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. This means that they should not be read as direct tests of Jung’s original theory.
For someone who tends towards introversion, generative AI may provide a useful bridge between private reflection and outward expression. For example, an introvert might feel that an idea feels very clear in their head, but when they try to explain it to someone else, the other person doesn’t get it. For some introverts, this can lead to frustration.
This is because people with this personality type sometimes have trouble moving from private thought to outward expression.
With AI, an idea does not have to arrive fully formed. Someone can give the AI model fragments, contradictions or half-developed thoughts and ask it to question them.
This is good for the introvert because the idea can be explored and externalized gradually in a relatively low pressure space. The AI can ask questions, request examples or challenge them before the idea is shared with another person.
This does not mean introverts “need” AI, or that extraverts do not reflect deeply. Personality and people are much more complex.
For someone who tends towards extraversion, the more useful role of AI might be almost the reverse. AI can supply more conversation, ideas and feedback. An extravert might gather opinions from colleagues and friends first, before sifting through the information to work out what they think. For people who tend towards this personality type, it may be about separating the signal from the noise.
Yet, AI, rather than clearing things up, may actually provide an externally orientated person with more noise. A better way might be to instruct the AI to stop generating ideas and create space for reflection, for instance: “Ask me questions that help me explore my own thoughts, rather than telling me what to think.”
Moving beyond
The same technology can reinforce our habitual way of thinking or help us move beyond it. This matters because emerging research suggests that we often like AI that resembles us.
A 2026 study published in Communications Psychology found that extraverted participants reported greater affiliation with an AI that used extraverted language.
In a separate experiment that was part of the same study, 64 percent of participants felt more engaged with an AI that mirrored their wider Big Five personality profile than one designed to display the opposite profile.
There is an important wrinkle. The researchers did not find equivalent evidence that introverted participants preferred an introverted AI. Moreover, they suggest that introversion may be harder to communicate through a short text conversation.
It is a useful reminder that personality matching is unlikely to be as simple as giving everyone an AI system that communicates like them.
Affirming behavior
Other recent research further complicates the picture. A study presented at CHI 2026, an international conference on human-computer interaction, found that after people discussed personal topics with an AI, their reported self-concepts became more aligned with personality characteristics exhibited by the AI system.
Longer conversations were associated with greater alignment with the AI. Greater alignment was also associated with greater enjoyment of the conversation. Enjoyment, however, does not necessarily tell us whether an interaction is helping us.
Research published in Science in 2026 examined sycophantic AI: systems that excessively affirm the user’s views or behavior, even when challenging them would be more appropriate.
When people discussed interpersonal conflicts with these systems, they became more convinced that they were right and less willing to take steps to repair the conflict.
Yet they also trusted the more agreeable responses, rated them more highly and were more willing to use the AI again. The troubling part is that the less helpful interaction may also be the more appealing one.
That creates a problem for the growing push towards personalized AI. If personalization is primarily designed around what feels comfortable or validating, we may end up creating increasingly sophisticated psychological mirrors.
But which side of the mirror are we on? Does the AI become more like us, do we become more like the AI, or do we gradually meet somewhere in the middle?
Jung was not arguing that one orientation—introversion or extroversion—was better than the other. His concern was with psychological one-sidedness and what can happen when one psychological orientation becomes too dominant.
Perhaps personalized AI should not simply accommodate whichever tendencies come most naturally to us. For the introvert, it might sometimes provide a bridge from reflection to expression. For the extravert, it may be more useful as a way of slowing things down and creating space for reflection.
If AI can both adapt to our tendencies and subtly influence how we see ourselves, it has deeper implications for what personalization actually means.
Perhaps the question is not simply what kind of AI suits us, but what our repeated interactions with it might encourage us to become.
This article was first published by The Conversation. Read the original article here.
