One of my earliest websites that had its own URL and press was The New Baby Name Index. It was one of the first of its kind and someone with less ideas would have run with it and found a way to translate the press it got into money.
But alas, I had many other ideas. Additionally, one day I sat down and performed the mental exercise of thinking “If I was going to become famous for something and do just it for years & years, would this be it? Do I want to talk ‘baby names’ for the rest of my life?”
I had created the site because I am fascinated with words, and specifically names. I think that there is a two-way association that forms between a person and their name. Not only do we become “Matte” as opposed to “Matt”, but there is just an immediate difference between a “Matt” and someone with any other name.
I didn’t wade in too deep into this fundamental psychology of names – I was too focused on building out the website. And though the site has been offline for decades, I still occasionally stumble back to the underlying idea that sparked it.
With the emergence of AI, with all of it’s baked in problems as it learns from what it digests about our world, I figured that it might provide a glance in to the underlying question of is there a particular look to a person with a given name?
As you can see, it has learned the obvious racial and cultural history for some of these names. What I am curious and not expecting was the additional country notation it added unprompted. Is “Matthew” really associated with Greenland somewhere in Gemini’s LLM?
(Btw, I think “Bejimn” is a seriously overlooked name, thanks AI for featuring it in the Rolodex of babies above. Same with “Sosh”.)
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