Can AI Clone Your Personality?
So little time, so much to do. Between the endless flurry of work emails, trying to keep up with loved ones, juggling errands, and attempting to squeeze a moment for yourself, it’s enough to make you wish there were two of you.
Well, science might just be catching up with that fantasy. At the end of last year, Stanford and Google researchers announced they had developed AI bots that can replicate people’s personalities — with an incredible 85% accuracy.
But before you start manifesting your own AI clone, our experts say you should pause for a second. For all the appeal of having a mini-you to take care of the daily grind, these AI imitators must be used with caution.
Bots That Pass a Personality Test
Back in November 2024, Stanford and Google came up with an AI tool that can mimic someone’s personality after just a two hour interview with them — that’s less time than it takes to enjoy a bottomless brunch with friends.
To test their invention, they got the bot to interview over 1,000 people one-on-one, asking them questions about their beliefs, preferences, backgrounds and so forth. From these interviews, the AI software built corresponding AI clones for each participant.
To test accuracy, researchers then put the clones through a series of tests, comparing their answers to their real-life counterparts. The results? The AI clones aced it. They achieved 85% accuracy in the social science quiz, 80% in the Big Five personality assessment, and 66% in well-known economic games like the Trust Game and Prisoner’s Dilemma.
“It seems quite amazing that we could create these open-ended agents of real people,” Joon Sung Park, Stanford PhD student and lead researcher, told the media. “If you can have a bunch of small ‘yous’ running around and actually making the decisions that you would have made—that, I think, is ultimately the future.”
Other tech giants agree. At a 2024 conference, Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan, proposed a near-future where AI clones attend meetings on behalf of humans, and make decisions just as a person would, so they can focus on higher value tasks, or even have more leisure time.
“If you look at just videoconferencing, I think we can leverage AI more and more. You do not need to spend so much time [in meetings]. You can leverage AI to do that,” he said. “You and I can have more time for in-person interactions—but maybe not for work. Why do we need to work five days a week? Why not spend more time with your family?”
Will AI Clones Take Our Jobs?
The tech industry makes it sound like AI clones are paving the way for a utopian world. With bots doing mundane tasks on our behalf, we’ll have more freedom to live life to the fullest, they say.
But other experts aren’t sure the vision is all that rosy. In reality, there are quite a few ‘buts’ when it comes to these bots. The biggest one is job displacement. If AI clones can do everything we can, faster and better, what happens to our jobs?
Tech analyst Rob Enderle is concerned that clones will naturally lead to job losses. “The emergence of these will need a huge amount of thought and ethical consideration, because a thinking replica of ourselves could be incredibly useful to employers,” he said to the BBC. “What happens if your company creates a digital twin of you, and says “hey, you've got this digital twin who we pay no salary to, so why are we still employing you?””
While this certainly sounds dystopian, it might not be all that bad. Futurist Daniel Hulme argues that AI won’t replace us, it will liberate us. He envisions a world where Universal Basic Income becomes the norm, allowing people to pursue passions instead of jobs.
“Imagine being born into a world where people don’t have access to paid work, but everything they need to survive and thrive as a human being is free—it’s abundant,” he said in an episode of The Futurist Society podcast. He acknowledges that some people may struggle with the loss of identity tied to work, but believes this concern is overblown.
“I know lots of people who don’t have jobs. They’re not sitting at home bored and depressed,” he says. “They typically use their time to contribute to humanity. If we apply AI in the right way, over the next decade, we can free people from economic constraints to live their true humanity.”
Can AI Really Mimic Someone’s Personality?
The job loss argument is moot if AI clones cannot do what they claim. Some experts are adamant that AI will never have truly human-like qualities — it doesn’t think like us; it doesn’t reason, create or understand.
As Emily Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, explained in a recent interview, AI simply processes patterns and generates responses based on the data it has been fed. It’s not intelligence — it’s imitation.
“These systems are not understanding, having some thoughts, doing some reasoning, and then coming back with an answer,” she says. “Instead, they are stitching together sequences of letters from their training data in a way that matches the probabilities.”
In essence, AI lacks emotional intelligence — the empathy, other awareness and intuition that humans rely on to navigate the world. Sure, it might be able to answer a run-of-the-mill email in a tone and style that you would use. But what about a nuanced complaint, or a sensitive negotiation, or a message from a colleague saying they’re not well? Could we really trust AI to put our best selves forward in those kinds of situations?
Dr Clare Walsh, director of education at the Institute of Analytics doesn’t think so. She notes that machines cannot understand the full depth of human personality. "Modern day technologies work with partial awareness of the world they operate in, and that can be incredibly dangerous," she told the BBC. "Human experience is near infinite, and machines cannot be trusted to work with the many, many parameters out there."
What About Negative Traits in Your Personality Profile?
If you’ve taken the Big Five Personality test, you’ll know that some personality traits are more desirable than others. High Neuroticism, for example, means someone is prone to anxiety and self-doubt, whilst a low Agreeableness score equates to someone who is more independent than collaborative, with a tendency to be confrontational.
This begs the question, if our AI clones are another version of ‘us’, will they take on parts of our personality that we aren’t so proud of? The parts that we try to temper and manage?
According to futurist John Nosta, the answer is thankfully no. That’s because AI clones won’t be exact replicas of us, per se. They’re more likely to be our “best” selves — equipped to help us grow, improve and manage our emotions better. He calls these clones “cognitive companions.” “The cognitive companion is an active participant in our thought processes, not just reflecting but enhancing them,” he wrote in Psychology Today. “It doesn't just collect data or simulate outcomes—it interacts with our thoughts, helping us reflect, problem-solve, and explore new perspectives.”
It’s an exciting idea. It’s almost like having a therapist or life-coach in your pocket, someone who knows your patterns, strengths and weaknesses, and can help you make decisions that align with what you really want.
“Your AI digital twin is essentially a super-helper software copy of you,” explains computer scientist Jim Spohrer in a recent blog. “It is ‘in tune with’ every minute of your life, from sleep-cycles, eating and exercise, to meetings, work activities and always predicting your investments of time, money, attention and energy.”
While it sounds futuristic, these kinds of clones are already in development. MindBank AI, for example, is a startup that makes digital twins for personal development and mental health. It’s one of the first players in the space, but it certainly won’t be the last. In fact, analysts predict the digital twin market will reach $183 billion in revenue by 2031. Clearly, AI clones are coming — and fast.
The Clones You Never Asked For
What if you don’t want a digital twin? That brings us to our final concern. That is, clones created without our permission, perhaps for use in fraud situations. Instances of this are already happening with the rise of AI voice scams: tools that use social media videos of people to mimic the sound and tone of their voice with eerie accuracy.
“As AI democratises access to technologies that can manipulate images, audio and video, our identities are becoming increasingly vulnerable to harms not captured by legal protections,” explained Elizabeth Englezos, Lecturer at Griffith University, in The Conversation. “AI can be used to manipulate or create content that shows “you” doing things you haven’t or would never do—it could make you appear less competent, or undermine your reputation.”
This is, perhaps, the darkest side of AI clones. While they can be great for reducing workloads, they can also be used maliciously—for revenge, a cruel joke or online scams. Worse still, Englezos says, currently, there are no laws in place to protect people from these kinds of crimes. “Most legal avenues afford ill-fitted remedies,” she says. “We need a right to identity, and with that a right to request the removal, deletion (or otherwise) of content that causes identity harm.”
AI Clones: Use With Caution
These concerns aren’t here to scare you off AI clones — just to help you separate the hype from reality. AI clones are coming, and they’ll no doubt boost productivity and maybe even help us reclaim some work-life balance. But, as the saying goes, there is no rose without a thorn, and AI certainly comes with its fair share of thorns.
The key is to maintain a sense of control. Governments will (hopefully) handle the privacy side of things, but it’s on you to manage any AI clone solutions you sign-up for. So, be mindful about what you share, double-check what it creates, and don’t take its advice as gospel. Because at the end of the day, no matter how well AI mimics your personality, it is only ever an imitation. You, on the other hand, are an original.
