AI-assisted Investigations
Goal
At the time of posting (Aug-2026), generative AI-assistants (like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini) have limitations in making relevant judgements about personal and social functioning. What they can do well, however, is highlight conceptual inconsistency and imprecise or misleading formulations—as well as usefully identifying typos, mis-spellings and the like.
Because an AI-assistant can read very quickly and hold much more in memory than a person can, requested comparisons can be facilitated and expedited.
No existing AI-assistant, however advanced, is taxonomically sophisticated and none has any background in this particular taxonomy (THEE). However, an AI-assistant working closely with me can dramatically increase my efficiency in addressing cross-framework puzzles and issues.
AI as Sparring Partner
An AI-assistant helps me with the burdensome task of keeping masses of taxonomic material in focus and checking emerging propositions against these.
I can do such work myself, but checking past frameworks is extremely time-consuming. Also, it is very easy for me to make errors of both omission and commission.
Because a taxonomic approach in human functioning is largely absent in the literature, AI assistants rarely produce correct formulations. When in doubt, I draw on my own experiences but again, AI-bots do not have experiences and cannot use intuition.
I find it helpful to explain to the AI-assistant why their suggestions are incorrect and try to give guidance based on taxonomic principles that are well-established. Doing this gets my own mind working and usually puts me on the right track.
AI-assistants use language in a way that is repetitive and not in character with this website. So it was never sensible to copy and paste wadges of text. More seriously, the AI-assistant repeatedly made mistakes or interpolated inappropriate assumptions. When I confronted and explained, adjustments followed but old wrong thinking frequently found its way back into responses. Vigilance and my sense of responsibility reduce the risk of such errors influencing conclusions.
An AI-Study
Pressures and unfolding dualities in structural hierarchies.
The initial goal was to determine whether the descriptions of groups and groupings in structural hierarchies support proposed assignments of 1° and 2° psychosocial pressures based on just one case. This would allow me to assert those assignments as a general principle.
Because many frameworks had been developed prior to conceptualizing psychosocial pressures, finding their presence implicit in the formulations would offer some validation.
If I had done this review myself, I would have been biased. The inevitably limited understanding of the AI-assistant was a worthwhile price to pay for its lack of prior commitment to my conjectures. While AI-assistants are programmed to agree with users, and so may possibly seek to please me by supporting my conjectures, intelligent arguments with extracts from the older frameworks offset this to some degree.
As authors invariably say about advice from colleagues: any mistakes that remain in this study are my sole responsibility.
Originally posted: 15-Aug-2026. Amended: 6-Oct-2026.
