It is now possible to create a virtual replica of you that, "is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy," MIT Technology Review reports (unpaywalled copy).

This is the conclusion of a study by a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, published in arXiv.

Imagine if you could sit down with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) for a chat that lasts two hours, where you talk about everything from your childhood memories to your views on big issues like immigration. After your conversation, this AI could create an avatar that acts, thinks, and responds just like you.

This study involved over 1,000 people from diverse backgrounds who were interviewed for two hours each. The goal was to create 'simulation agents', which are AI models designed to reproduce the behavior of a specific person with high accuracy. These agents then went through the same set of tests as the humans to see how well they could replicate their behaviors, achieving an impressive 85% similarity.

Simulation agents

Simulation agents act as digital stand-ins for real people, allowing researchers to simulate social and behavioral scenarios. This can be useful for studying things like the spread of misinformation or how people might react in certain social situations.

These agents differ from the more common tool-based agents that perform specific tasks like booking appointments or retrieving information, rather than simulating human interactions or personalities.

John Horton, an associate professor from MIT, highlights that this approach represents a hybrid model where real human data feeds into AI personae that researchers use in simulations, opening new channels of research that would be too costly or ethically challenging with real people.

To make these AI agents, the researchers used qualitative interviews, where they talked to participants to gather rich, detailed information about their lives and views. This method proved more effective than traditional surveys for capturing the unique traits of individuals.

Joon Sung Park, leading the study, noted that interviews can reveal profound details about a person, like surviving a serious illness, which might not come out in typical surveys. This approach is more time-efficient for creating a detailed profile.

This new study suggests that with just a couple of in-depth conversations, it could be possible to create a fairly accurate digital twin. This could spark interest in companies like Tavus, which might now look into using similar techniques for their services.

Deepfake AI persons?

Advancements in AI open up discussions about privacy, consent, and the ethical implications of digital replication.

This technology isn't without its risks. Just like AI can create deepfakes – fake media that looks real – this could lead to unauthorized digital impersonations. The methods used to assess the accuracy of these AI replicas were basic; they included standard social surveys and personality assessments, which might not capture all the nuances of human individuality. For instance, AI agents struggled more with behavioral tests that measure fairness and altruism.

Personality capture and preservation

However, there are other methods to create digital twins, where AI models learn from a person's emails or other digital footprints, which yield a lot more data.

This is akin to the methods of personality capture and preservation proposed by William Sims Bainbridge and Martine Rothblatt; they have proposed to collect and preserve digital reflections of an individual's personality, essentially creating a digital version of a person. There ideas sound like science fiction that could, one day, become science fact.

Bainbridge and Rothblatt propose to capture one's personality by accumulating data including answers to structured questionnaires, but also emails, social media posts, blogs, photos, and online activities.

This collection forms a 'mindfile', which Rothblatt describes as a sum of saved digital reflections about an individual. The idea extends to using this data with future AI technologies to emulate or upload a person's consciousness into a digital or robotic form, thereby achieving a form of digital immortality.

Bainbridge and Rothblatt believe that digital technology could capture human identity and personality. With sufficient technological advancement, digital data and AI recreate or preserve an individual's essence after their physical death.

See Bainbridge's book Personality Capture and Emulation (2013), and Rothblatt's books Virtually Human: The Promise – and the Peril – of Digital Immortality (2014) and Principles of Geoethics: A Synthesis of Geography and Bioethics (2023).

I think answers to questionnaires, emails, social media posts, blogs, photos, and online records recorded with current means could not achieve the rich texture needed to emulate a real human personality.

But I don't rule out the possibility that new brain-machine interfaces like Neuralink could make the process viable.

Of course this would be light years ahead of the preliminary experiments of the Stanford and Google DeepMind researchers. But we can think of our preliminary experiments as encouraging baby steps toward the distant goal of creating a digital replica of a person. Technology could eventually allow to endow the replica with consciousness.

Popular culture is warming up to the idea

Greg Gutfeld and his guests discussed the MIT Technology Review article in Gutfeld's very popular show.

Of course the discussion was fun, as appropriate to a comic show. But the very fact that the host of a popular show discussed these arcane and weird things shows that popular culture is warming up to the possibility of creating digital persons.