Skip to contentShould You Create an AI Clone of Yourself?
by Christopher Spencer B.A. (Hons) MCIM
Chartered Marketer and Co-Founder of Peak Media Marketing
AI avatar generators can clone your face and your voice… but not you.
What a time to be alive. In just under three years, mainstream AI use has gone from being able to reply our emails for us… to (just) replicating an entire human persona.
So if you’ve ever wished that you could create an AI clone of yourself to send to work on zoom calls, then this could be just the ticket.
So how do you make an AI Clone of Yourself?
There are plenty of online platforms to go at when it comes to creating AI avatars. So by using a platform like ElevenLabs, HeyGen, Creatify, Synthesia and many other companies who turn up in search engine and AI results and answers when using the keyword / search term “AI Avatar Generators”, then you will be taken through a series of prompts to train the model to synthesise you as an AI avatar version of yourself.
In essence they are large language models (LLMs) and computer vision systems which are trained to map your face, voice, and speaking style. The final clone is generated by simply typing a script into the platform, which the digital replica then delivers instantly in the cloned voice and likeness. More reputable services will require a verbal consent script to ensure legal ownership of the new digital asset.
What are the pros of making an AI Clone of Yourself?
There are plenty of pros when it comes to having an avatar version of you. Your AI clone will always be camera ready and never get camera nerves, you don’t need to hire a studio or pay for the support staff. You don’t need expensive cameras, microphones or editing suites.
You just have access to a “best you” who is always available and easily editable and can be translated into any language that you can think of, much quicker than you could ever learn a language for real. Making you easily accessible, readily available and extremely scalable.
What can you use an AI Clone of Yourself for?
There’s a multitude of uses for avatar clones which ranges from hosting video ads and webinars to delivering learning courses and explainer videos. They can be used for internal corporate training videos, learning and development and sales enablement.
So don’t be at all surprised if customer services and complaints departments become staffed entirely as many clones as industry can staff them with.
What are the cons of making an AI Clone of Yourself?
There are, as with anything, several notable downsides to making an AI clone / avatar of a person. It could be a case of someone’s rights to their own identity.
So for instance if you left a job on less than peachy terms. You might want to request that your likeness no longer be used for any materials that have been created using it and this takes us into a very contentious area of civil and employment law.
This combined with any residual revenues that are generated by the use of the avatar means that there are legal and financial minefields waiting to happen.
Let’s hope that the legal team are not AI clones. Least not because the very notion of an eloquence of of AI synthesised lawyers in itself, is the stuff that nightmares are made of.
If James Cameron had thought of that, instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger,
The Terminator would have been a horror film for sure.
Any other downsides to making an AI Clone of Yourself?
Yes, plenty of them. The biggest problem with AI cloning is that the large language model element of what makes the synthesised AI clone, has no human heart beating in its body. It has no feelings, no emotions and no scruples.
So we’re already halfway there to making the legal team of AI avatars.
AI also hallucinates and makes up what it doesn’t know to fill in the gaps in its knowledge.
Ai clones also lack experience, expertise and authority which can lead to a lack of trust from a human audience.
One of the most daunting downsides to having an AI avatar of a real human, is the risk of deepfakes and the damage that could be done to a person if materials were created using illegal and inappropriate prompts.
It could be nothing short of catastrophic to someone’s reputation.
AI is also seen as the second coming right now but in reality, we don’t quite get what its “best use case" is at this point..
It’s like the people who were using the newly launched microwave ovens in the 1980s to try and roast chickens and make toast.
We just don’t quite get how to ensure good practice from end users yet and so it will become what we make of it.
But that said, if there’s still a chance that we can create AI clones of ourselves to sit in zoom meetings for us, while we finish Netflix or whatever we like .. then why not build an army of them? Jokes aside, AI avatars are tools, not replacements.
Use them where you'd use a template or a recording. Don't use them where you'd need an actual human being.
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