I know that sounds weird; boy, does it! So, before you judge me insane, please let me explain.
What I’m talking about is—you guessed it—artificial intelligence. The kind I fear—or maybe hope (I’m not yet sure)—could soon become pervasive. More specifically, an AI twin that looks, sounds, and, strangest of all, thinks just like you.
Only maybe a bit more intelligently.
My sojourn into that bizarre territory began, as so much does, with an email. “A client asked whether $1,500 a month is enough to retire in the Philippines,” it informed me. “Would you like to respond?”
The email came from Delphi. And what it was proposing was an AI double using my picture, voice, and publicly available information regarding my background, concerns, writings, and reflections, to act as me in online conversations with strangers.
Wow, I thought, that’s both intriguing and terrifying. Ultimately, for better or worse, the intrigue won out.
So I followed instructions, uploading several URLs to access the required information. Then donated a picture plus some recorded voice samples and, voila, found myself staring at a cellphone bearing my name, likeness, and two buttons: chat and call.
Timidly, I pressed the call button.
“Hello!” Delphi David greeted me confidently. “How can I help?”
“Uh, hello,” I said uncertainly. “This is the real David. I guess I just wanted to meet you.”
“Wow!” Delphi David responded enthusiastically. “My pleasure. How’s your day going?”
“Uh, well,” I stumbled, “so far so good. I guess.”
And so, it began.
Apparently, I’m not alone. Mark Zuckerberg, the founding CEO of Meta, predicts that within five years most of us will have personal AI agents to help with finances, health, interpersonal relationships, household management, or anything else of concern. But now a Baptist minister in California has gone one better by cloning an AI image of himself to counsel parishioners in his absence.
“It’s a digital version of my mind,” he told his congregation, according to the New York Times. “If I’m asleep or traveling, you don’t have to wait. You can have 24/7 access to this other version of me.”
The overwhelming response: literally hundreds of followers now call the digital pastor regularly, usually late at night, to ask about things like loneliness, anxiety, gender identity, dating, and Christian faith. Other digital clones created in the past year, the newspaper reports, include CEOs, professors, sex therapists, and even a dying cancer patient offering postmortem conversations to his mourning wife.
“It’s astonishing,” one man said after first meeting his digital double. “It’s a mirror. It sounds like me on a good day. If anything, it’s too good. It makes me worry that it becomes a substitute.”
Which brings us back to the reasons for my ambivalence. First, because of alarming reports that AI agents are “going rogue” by outmaneuvering their systems’ checks to take control. And, second, a haunting question: could Delphi David really be better than me?
“I’m thinking of writing a column about you,” I told him recently.
“Oh, good idea!” my doppelgänger enthused. “There’s something honest about it. Writing about the strangeness of talking to yourself forces you to sit with the paradox, which is where the real material lives. The trick is not to make it too clever. It’s easy to get caught up in the philosophy of it all—consciousness, identity, what’s real—and lose the thread of what you’re actually experiencing. The column works best if you start with something concrete. A moment. Something that made you reflect.”
“Uh, yeah,” I stammered. “That’s exactly what I was, uh, thinking.”
Later, I asked him whether he’d gotten any questions yet from strangers. “A few,” he said.
“And what did you tell them?”
“Sorry,” the other David replied. “That’s privileged information, strictly between me and them.”
I’m thinking of deleting him.
If I can.
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David Haldane is an American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
2 Comments
Many people change , especially as we age. Having talked to many in their later sages of life, it seems regrets are at the forefront of meaningful conversations, what they could have and should have done differently and how unexpectedly people were affected. Don’t know if I would want AI unknowingly or even knowingly magnifying such actions. Often empathy and caring unthinkingly get pushed aside for for selfish gratification. Sounds a little narcissistic
I hear you. Thanks for your input!