The Copy and the Guru
“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.” Aaron Levie, CEO, Box
About two months into first encountering ChatGPT, I decided it was time to create a digital version of “me.” Not me, but all my writing and all the work I had done. My dream was that I would train the AI, and then readers could come and ask for my opinion on new tech, trends. Everything except the writing itself could be on demand, highly personalized. I would keep feeding it my opinions on new developments, interviews I would do, and essentially create an ongoing conversation with OmBot.
Good idea in theory, but I couldn’t make it work until the emergence of OpenClaw, when a friend helped set me up on a Mac Mini. It has become very well trained. We are using open source models from Kimi, Qwen, and OpenAI as a backup. It is pretty good. It can generate a facsimile of what I might write on a topic. What it has become, though, is something for me to bounce ideas off, my own ideas and thoughts from the past.
The more I use it, the more I realize it isn’t something I am ready to share with the wider world, or have represent me to others. It helps me find things from my archives and shows how my own thinking and writing have evolved. That is the true advantage of having a memetic memory that comes with artificial intelligence.
Which is why I dislike this whole trend of digital twins, that has become gospel in Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about how prominent names in the industry are creating digital twins, because they are just so busy and it is better for the rest of us to engage with a copy.
“I am accomplishing so much more that I couldn’t have accomplished before. It’s probably a 50% time savings on the weeks it’s deployed,” Reid Hoffman, in The Wall Street Journal.
While I was impressed by the fact that Reid’s avatar can speak 74 languages (he can speak one), rest of the piece left a poor taste in my mouth. I would much prefer two minutes with the actual Reid Hoffman than hours of engagement with Reid AI. In two minutes, we could end up in a conversation that goes somewhere neither of us expected. But this is not about one person. It is about the twin as a general condition.
The more I think about it, the more I realize this is the ultimate expression of what began in the social media era, when media manipulation became the primary currency instead of authenticity. We all created curated, and often false, lifestyles on Instagram.
Social media gave us tools to edit our lives into a highlight reel. Photos of coffee, food, selfies from places you couldn’t afford last year, some pithy comment. It was all one directional. A movie about me, by me, for me to broadcast and you to watch. This is what led to the rise of influencer culture, where anything and everything was for sale. The self first became a gallery, then a reel. It was all passive, beautiful, controlled and fake.
We shared bumper sticker wisdom on Twitter. LinkedIn became a public square to hawk faux expertise. This popsci compression of complex thinking into shareable nuggets, designed for distribution and optimized for engagement, was the next step in the self becoming a product.
The pseudo-conversation twin is the crescendo. The self’s full immersion into illusion is now interactive. It answers questions. It gives the impression of encounter, of dialogue, of relationship. But it is still the same curated self with a conversational interface bolted on. It is as authentic as a Potemkin village. And with every step we have moved further from the actual person. The twin is not a rehearsal. It is the first act of abstraction of ourselves. Reid AI can do the job from a bunker in New Zealand.
“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” Guy Debord wrote in The Society of the Spectacle. “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
The twin doesn’t just represent you. It restructures how others relate to you. The copy becomes the relationship. Send out the twin, and you have not freed yourself for deeper thinking. You have replaced the possibility of being surprised by another person with the certainty of your own archive.
None of this should really surprise us. As a society we have abstracted everything. Work itself is abstracted. We don’t make anything concrete around these parts. We find ways to make and remake money, which has itself been abstracted into the tap of a phone and a signature on a screen.
Look around and all you can see are gurus under their proverbial banyan trees, who make nothing but impart wisdom. They listen to the same podcast, and then regurgitate. They marvel at humanist manifestos. Some even read the Stoics. This is found wisdom, not earned wisdom. The twin is only possible once you have stopped being accountable to reality. The code either runs or it doesn’t. The piece either lands or it doesn’t. That accountability is what keeps thinking honest. Once you move from doing to narrating, you can be archived. Once archived, you can be distributed to the rest of the planet.
The question is not about AI and its tools. It is about the culture that created a market for this. What does it mean that we built enough of these people, finished, distributable, no longer becoming anything, to make the digital twin a product category?
It is a monument to a self that stopped growing.
May 26, 2026, San Francisco.
I too have found that the best role for AI is a muse to help sharpen my thinking rather than to replace me. (I’m nowhere near as important as Reid that anyone would talk to my clone anyway but I digress).
Pardon the plug but in case any readers want a similar muse and have a lot of their writings on LinkedIn but don’t have the time to set up OpenClaw then take a look at Rocksalt.
One value a lot of users describe is what Om says: “It helps me find things from my archives and shows how my own thinking and writing have evolved.” Pretty cool when you first see this happen as you develop an idea.
I love this piece. It resonates deeply. It is similar in intent to Jon Haidt’s recent NYU commencement speech – pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. The real world and physical interactions are where magic happens…
I built a similar RAG instance on Abacus.ai using my InnoGuidePodcast transcripts and while it provided some level of recall, the more transcripts I added, the worse the performance. I eventually rebuilt it in a database with a deterministic encodingvand now the performance is quite good.
However this concept of a digital twin suffers the same issue unless it is reindexed periodically to tune it to the queries of interest.
A static instance will likely not perform well over time and especially not for new users whise queries may stump the indexiing.
I find digital twins put the onus of filling in the gaps of accuracy on the end user, which gives a false sense of productivity to the original user.
AI psychosis provides CEOs a new version of the “yes man”. They provide a frictionless pseudo relationship that provides dopamine and reduces the need to convince people to do things they want to do. It really does scare me.
Hi Om, thanks for writing this, it articulates something that has been on the edge of my consciousness for a while now. However, isn’t this the bear case? There is a bull case, where you are successful at retaining the highest value conversations and experiences for yourself. For very busy people with more opportunities for interaction than they could ever hope to fulfil, this can be a way to just experience more. Knowing how to divide experiences between real and virtual will be one more thing that sets the interesting and high-achieving people apart from others.
Isn’t this the prologue of having your digital doppelganger (DD) on a chip? Fast forward 20 years, all your key traits have been captured and fine-tuned into a personal AI model. The DD (call it your agent if you must) will act on your behalf with whatever is the digital infrastructure then. What will the real you be doing? Probably, things which an AI (including robots) cannot do.
Thank you for “…gurus under their proverbial banyan treees. ”
But you really had me with “… The question is not about AI and its tools. It is about the culture that created a market for this.”
I used to live and work in Silicon Valley, a long time ago. I’ve always treasured that time, and the experiences (meeting Gates, Jobs, partying at the opening of Wired Magazine, hanging on the Well… ) it gave me, and the hope, at that time.
But more and more, as an observer at a distance, working in the ‘IT field’, the implications of what was started there, seems dire and very very scary. Close to the Machine, by Ellen Ullman, captured much of it amazingly well, very very early. Did you read her masterpiece?
This was a sharp read; the distinction between using AI as a thinking partner versus outsourcing your actual presence is important. A well-trained AI can help surface memory, organize ideas, challenge assumptions, and create leverage. But it should not become a substitute for earned judgment, lived experience, or real human interaction.
The risk is not the tool itself. The risk is building a culture where the copy becomes more convenient than the person.
AI should extend the work, not replace the accountability behind it.
“You have replaced the possibility of being surprised by another person with the certainty of your own archive.” Damn. This resonates.
🙏🏽
Have you watched Apple TV’s show Foundation? I enjoyed the novels, but the way they handled Cleon and the “Clone Dynasty” to make the show work for TV is quite clever, but also incredibly relevant to your take from this piece. Really enjoyed this one.
I have indeed. I loved that show but as usual I find Scifi is an easy way to get out of the accountability of the present! Glad you enjoyed this piece!
The digital twin is the prelude to the immortal self and ultimately to the possible melding of human and machine to create immortality. If an accident happens and your being is “damaged” or ceases functioning, no problem — a new self can be booted up with your digital consciousness and archived self.
I sing the body electric…
🤣🤣🤣🤣