Who are they for? Delphi, a startup that recently raised $16 million from funders including Anthropic and actor/director Olivia Wilde’s venture capital firm, Proximity Ventures, helps famous people create replicas that can speak with their fans in both chat and voice calls. It feels like MasterClass—the platform for instructional seminars led by celebrities—vaulted into the AI age. On its website, Delphi writes that modern leaders “possess potentially life-altering knowledge and wisdom, but their time is limited and access is constrained.”
It has a library of official clones created by famous figures that you can speak with. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, told me, “I’m here to cut the crap and help you get stronger and happier,” before informing me cheerily that I’ve now been signed up to receive the Arnold’s Pump Club newsletter. Even if his or other celebrities’ clones fall short of Delphi’s lofty vision of spreading “personalized wisdom at scale,” they at least seem to serve as a funnel to find fans, build mailing lists, or sell supplements.
But what about for the rest of us? Could well-crafted clones serve as our stand-ins? I certainly feel stretched thin at work sometimes, wishing I could be in two places at once, and I bet you do too. I could see a replica popping into a virtual meeting with a PR representative, not to trick them into thinking it’s the real me, but simply to take a brief call on my behalf. A recording of this call might summarize how it went.
To find out, I tried making a clone. Tavus, a Y Combinator alum that raised $18 million last year, will build a video avatar of you (plans start at $59 per month) that can be coached to reflect your personality and can join video calls. These clones have the “emotional intelligence of humans, with the reach of machines,” according to the company. “Reporter’s assistant” does not appear on the company’s site as an example use case, but it does mention therapists, physician’s assistants, and other roles that could benefit from an AI clone.
For Tavus’s onboarding process, I turned on my camera, read through a script to help it learn my voice (which also acted as a waiver, with me agreeing to lend my likeness to Tavus), and recorded one minute of me just sitting in silence. Within a few hours, my avatar was ready. Upon meeting this digital me, I found it looked and spoke like I do (though I hated its teeth). But faking my appearance was the easy part. Could it learn enough about me and what topics I cover to serve as a stand-in with minimal risk of embarrassing me?
Via a helpful chatbot interface, Tavus walked me through how to craft my clone’s personality, asking what I wanted the replica to do. It then helped me formulate instructions that became its operating manual. I uploaded three dozen of my stories that it could use to reference what I cover. It may have benefited from having more of my content—interviews, reporting notes, and the like—but I would never share that data for a host of reasons, not the least of which being that the other people who appear in it have not consented to their sides of our conversations being used to train an AI replica.
So in the realm of AI—where models learn from entire libraries of data—I didn’t give my clone all that much to learn from, but I was still hopeful it had enough to be useful.
Alas, conversationally it was a wild card. It acted overly excited about story pitches I would never pursue. It repeated itself, and it kept saying it was checking my schedule to set up a meeting with the real me, which it could not do as I never gave it access to my calendar. It spoke in loops, with no way for the person on the other end to wrap up the conversation.