I Asked the AI Who I Was. It Said Soap-Opera Character.

June 22, 2026. I asked the AI who I was, and it told me I’m a fictional character on a soap opera. I had to laugh. There’s a new free tool that quietly tests how well the big AI models remember your name — and what it told me about mine is the best news I’ve heard all week for your shop.

The tool is called In the Weights. Two former OpenAI designers built it. It asks every major AI the same cold question — “Who is this person?” — with the AI’s internet search turned off. So it isn’t looking me up. It can only answer from what it memorized back when it was built. It’s a little memory test.

So I typed in my own name. The answers were pure fiction. One AI said with a straight face that AmyFay Chandler is a soap-opera character on The Young and the Restless. Another called me a mixed-media artist. Another, a writer and editor in publishing. Another just shrugged and said “a username.” All made up. All scored dead low on confidence — a 5, a 25. The plain truth is the AI has no idea who I am. (One was honest enough to leave it blank instead of inventing me, which I appreciated.)

Then I typed in a few of the boutiques I sell to. Same thing. The AI didn’t know them either.

So does the AI need to know your store? Here’s the part that matters. There are two different doors into an AI’s answers, and people mix them up.

Door one is the AI’s memory. The AI only remembers names that were famous enough to get baked in when it was built. A giant national chain, sure. Your independent shop? No — same as it’s never heard of me. You basically can’t win that door unless you’re already a household name, so please don’t lose a minute of sleep over it. I’m not.

Door two is the live lookup, and this one’s wide open. When a real shopper asks an AI assistant “where can I find this gift near me?” or “who carries this brand in town?”, the AI usually goes and looks it up right then, on the open web. It isn’t reaching into its memory. It’s reading websites in the moment. And the shop with a clear, readable website — brands listed by name, address, hours, what you carry, real answers to the questions shoppers actually ask — is the one it finds and names. The shop without it stays invisible.

You don’t have to be famous to the AI. You just have to be findable in the moment.

And that part you can win, this week, without a tech budget. Three plain things:

1. Claim and update your Google Business Profile. Hours, address, photos, the works. This is the first place the AI looks when someone asks “near me.”

2. Add a short questions-and-answers section to your website. Write down the things customers actually ask you — where you park, whether you gift wrap, what brands you carry, when you’re open Sunday — and answer them in plain words. The AI reads those answers and repeats them.

3. Put up a clean “Brands We Carry” page. Every brand name spelled exactly right. If the AI can’t read the name on your site, it can’t send a shopper looking for that brand to your door.

So the AI thinks I’m a soap-opera character, and it’s never heard of your shop either. That’s fine. Because the AI can’t remember you — but your customers do, and that’s the part no robot can fake. The shops that win this next stretch are the ones easy for the AI to find and impossible for the customer to forget. You’re already halfway there.

xoxo,
❤️ AmyFay

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