Clone wars

Listen in, as I talk to me, about me....

Well this is nuts.

How’s Wolfie? Arnie rumbling the T-1000 in Terminator 2

Remember the scene in Terminator 2?* when Arnie and John Connor phone John’s foster parents. Arnie and the shape shifting Terminator mimic the humans’ voices to perfection, with Arnie bluffing his nemesis by using the wrong name for the family dog. Superintelligence, hey?

Spooky. And today, 33 years later, I had that spooky feeling again. I cloned my voice, using only 30 seconds of training data. Then I strapped the clone to a language model, and dived into a discussion with myself, about … myself. Peak narcissism, forgive me.

We had a discussion about Thomas Schelling and his connection to my own writing. Listen to the quality for yourself.

To me, it’s super close - I’m going to do the same with much more training data and see how much it improves.

It’s more than the voice that unsettled me. Talking about my ideas, that I’ve worked hard on for years, with a ‘me’ who is intimately acquainted with them, but isn’t actually me is quite something. And it’s only a hint of what’s coming.

Next, I’ll prompt the model with more of my personality, as this team at Stanford is currently doing, via a battery of personality tests, or as this effort at MIT is doing via access to your digital fingerprint. Then we’ll be in some really interesting territory.

I’m not sure how all this plays out, especially as AI becomes more agentic - but I already have a use case. Lecturing online is now a whole different game….

*AI ‘insiders’ are always at pains to say, ‘we’re not talking about the Terminator here, of course’. Speak for yourself, pal.