Using AI for playful career exploration, a test case

The other day, I was chatting with my nine year old son Patrick, who has been using an AI app to generate wild and wonderful portraits of himself and his friends. Of course, like any self-respecting career development practitioner would, I suggested he try creating some images of his future self. He soon had pictures of himself as a professional game designer, creating avatars for the 2035 edition of Just Dance. We started talking about the different elements he included in his prompt, how accurately the AI generator interpreted them, and what they mean for his current and future career interests and values.

So I decided to try to see if AI could promote some career reflection for myself. I found myself doing many iterations, which I think for this kind of activity is a feature, not a bug. It required me to think carefully about what gaps I felt each image had and how I might put into words the elements I wanted to be included. Here are some of the results.

Prompting exploration, reflection, and aspiration

I decided I wanted to create a portrait of myself. I used an AI generator designed to produce portraits (the feature image at the top of this page was created with the same prompts, but in a comic book template). I included information about the way I look and the nature of my environment in the prompt, along the lines of:

• I am: male, an academic, a scholar.

• I have: a big white beard.

• I enjoy: reading and writing, research, deep thought, connecting ideas.

• I feel: happy, satisfied with my career, respected by my peers, making a contribution to my community. 

• My office is: light, big window to a garden, a lot of books, some plants. 

I can't complain too much about these as representations of who I might be in the future. To be honest, they're not that far off who I am now. However, there are some important things for me to reflect on in these images, some questions they ask me.

Stereotypes and bias in AI

Clearly, if you ask AI to make an image of a male academic, you are working with one well-defined representational template. Note that I didn't include my skin colour in the prompts, but not a single one of the images generated showed a non-white scholar.

This raises a huge red flag regarding bias in this activity, and in AI in general. To be honest, it might make me think twice about trying this activity with other people in the same way that I approached it. I think I'd take the focus away from reflecting a person's physical characteristics, and put it more on the environment, certain activities or tasks, or even more abstract ideas. But it might actually be useful to help people confront the social and cultural stereotypes about certain professions, helping them reflect on how they see themselves fitting into them, or not.

Privilege and wealth

Following from that previous point, there is something about these blokes that suggest that they're not short of social, cultural, and financial capital. Now, it's not wrong of anyone to aspire to financial comfort, quality employment, and a big office to themself. But it's important to recognise that certain structures and systems that make these things more possible for some than for others. While I can aspire to these images, I should remain mindful that in getting there, I am in a position of privilege by virtue of several key aspects of who I am and where I come from.

Idealising the profession

I asked the generator to show an academic who is happy and satisfied. Their environments are clean and tidy. Overall, they reflect the idealised stereotype of the unhurried scholar living the life of the mind.

The unfortunate fact is that the academic profession can be extremely taxing on a person's wellbeing. The worst of it can include intense workloads, precarious work, unreasonable pressure to publish and secure grants, and toxic work environments. It raises the question if these images of my future self are naïve desires for an idealised kind of working life.

If I were my own career counsellor, I'd want to test these understandings of the realities of the academic labour market and work conditions. I need to treat this career goal of mine with great caution, as the reality of the work isn't always as it appears in these images.

Physical condition and health risks

Less concerning, but still an important prompt for my reflection, are certain features of my appearance in these images. These men look old! That's the result of me including my prematurely white beard in the prompt, obviously.

I struggled to get a full head of hair, and there seems to be nothing I can do to get rid of the glasses. I don't care that much about my hairline, but this did get me thinking about my eyesight. Though OK for now, I do work almost exclusively on a computer. It's almost inevitable that glasses are in my future, but I should be mindful of looking after my vision. My eyes do trouble me from time to time and I have reflected on what a disruption to my life and career it would be if I could no longer bear working on a screen.

Also, most of these images show men with a bit of a paunch and some dodgy posture. This is definitely who I am now but not necessarily who I want to be. Again, I read these qualities as an occupational risk that I need to be mindful of and actively work to manage.

Refining the image of my future self

As a knowledge worker, I haven't always had the best diet and exercise habits. As a result I carry more weight than I should, my posture is awful, and my knees, hips, shoulders, and back creak and crunch more than they should. I know that I need to do a better job of looking after myself, undoing the effects of past inactivity and building greater physical resilience as I age. One reason why I enjoy working from home is because I have easy access to both my kitchen and my garage gym, so I can more easily maintain healthier habits.

So I returned to the AI generator and added a few details about diet and exercise. I was finally able to get a full head of hair but couldn't find a way to lose the glasses.

Those arms on the bruiser on the left are probably a bit too aspirational, so I'll go with the bloke on the right. He's standing up nice and straight, looks like he doesn't worry too much about a sneeze doing his back in, and can clearly move a box of books when he needs to.

What's still missing

I got to a place I'm happy with, but there's still a big gap: my family. My work-life balance and ability to be with my wife and son are important to me, but they are not in these images. This might be the focus of my next round of playing with AI. I think it would be a challenge to cram more and more into one prompt, so I'll probably focus on building a collection of images that represent different elements of my future self.

Findings from an experiment of one

So, as you can see, about 30 minutes of playing with prompts in an AI image generator lead me to some quite deep reflection on what's important to me, what I need to be mindful of, and what kinds of things lay under the surface of the way I choose to work.

Given the bias that is so obvious, I'd suggest some caution, especially if you'd want to try this with marginalised clients. Nonetheless, this might actually help people recognise and confront some of the implicit biases, stereotypes, and expectations around careers, if handled sensitively.

If you give this activity a whirl yourself, post the results in the comments!