Where we store ourselves: Digital cloning

A few years ago, I was working for a startup that was pretty transparently a scam. It wasn’t obvious when I was hired, of course—but the more I pulled on threads, the more the technology they were working on didn’t really make any sense. 

But one of their many blue-sky ideas involved digital personhood. Today, we leave fragments of ourselves everywhere. My mortgage servicer has a very tiny perspective on who I am. My Google account has an extremely robust idea of who I am. But all these systems really only have the knowledge that I’ve given to them, whether intentionally or unintentionally. 

And all these fragments of ourselves out there are not under our direct control. When we move, we need to update our address in a million places. When we cancel a credit card, we have to update our payment methods. I genuinely don’t know what I would do if I had to change my phone number. I would have to reset two-factor authentication on everything I own.

So an idea this, uh, well, scam had, was to bring back some form of sovereignty over our digital selves, whereby across the digital domain there could be some unified sense of self, some kind of negotiation with you for your information each time it’s needed. If this sounds both philosophically great and pragmatically impossible, you’re right.

You’re certainly more right than the investors.

Your digital self

But it’s worth thinking about, as we spend more of our time online, that we have these digital selves running around—these fragmented digital models of our existence, some of them that we aren’t aware of, many of them frozen in time. And some of them with information we don’t actually want others to have.

Last year, I lost a very good friend. And we were really close for a long time. You know, we had experiences that only he and I shared; we had in-jokes that only he and I knew. So, it occurred to me later that a piece of me really had died with him. Not in an emotional sense, or a nostalgic sense, but in a very literal sense. The person he knew no longer existed because he was no longer there to know them.

I’m okay with my friend being a safeguard to a dead version of me. I think he would be, too. I think it would really tickle him. I’m less okay with losing sovereignty over my digital identity because I failed to read the Terms of Service. That’s why the GDPR outlines things like the right to be forgotten; really, the right to kill off these digital homunculi. 

But I think the question of where we store ourselves and our identities is going to continue to become more important. We now live in a world where someone could take all your old chatlogs and create a version of you. They can take all your images and videos and replicate you. And you don’t always have a choice; you know, with mass surveillance… any time you go in public you’re creating these fragments of digital selves, systems that are always tracking you. 

Where do we store ourselves, the bits of us that we own, the bits of us that we share. What right do we have to ourselves, what information is innately public? And how are people allowed to use those things against us?

Copies of the living

Some people are cloning themselves, though I do feel that Black Mirror expressly told us not to do that. In Black Mirror, it’s pretty dark; the clones operate as virtual assistants, but they need to be tortured into submission. Because you know, that’s kinda the interesting part of AGI isn’t it; it’s not the idea of true intelligence, it’s the idea of subservient intelligence.

We don’t have AGI yet. And people’s cloned selves are just agents that they use to do their work. There was also an Adam Sandler movie about this that got, as Adam Sandler movies do, surprisingly emotional at the end. We have the ability to passively fast-forward through life, just breezing through and never really touching anything.

Tech founders are already cloning themselves to attend conventions. Meta built an AI version of Zuckerberg “to interact with staff.” Uber employees created a clone of their CEO to talk to before giving presentations.

Way way back, Futurama had an episode where celebrities were being copied into robots. And there’s a whole plotline about how humans shouldn’t fall in love with robots. What’s funny is that people see it as about AI today, but it was actually about Napster—because the copies of the celebrities were unlicensed.

It’s important to note that we actually have very limited control over our own likeness unless our likeness is monetized. As it stands, creating an AI likeness of someone else isn’t innately illegal. It’s only illegal under a handful of circumstances, such as fraud or intimate content. Because we don’t actually own our likeness, what we really own is the right of publicity.

So, people are creating replicas of other people—and it’s really easy. 

Copies of the dead

Even the dead cannot escape cloning.

Back in 2024, a bereaved father discovered that someone had created a chatbot of his deceased daughter on Character AI. That is a flash fiction horror story. Character AI has locked itself down somewhat since, but back then there were no controls over what you could do. 

There are actually many services today that you can use to replicate the dead. You can upload chatlogs and images of a person and, for a low subscription fee, you could make a copy of your dead friend. Every few months, someone will use an AI generator at a funeral so that a dead person can deliver their very own eulogy.

I suspect that these coping methods likely hinder the act of processing grief by creating some kind of otherworldly hope that the experience of the person you loved is still there. But you can’t blame someone who is grieving for the way that they grieve. You can blame the companies.

Just like a lot of people have DNR plans, we may need to start putting “Do not AI” into our wills. Even if it isn’t legally actionable, and really nothing is legally actionable when you’re dead, at least you could firmly communicate to your family members that this isn’t the way you want them to grieve.

The way we hold who we are

We are only who we are because of our relationships with others. Friends, family, coworkers, and broader society—we hold much of ourselves outside of ourselves. Now that we spend much of our time online, we may find this footprint becoming broader, more fragmented. Are you the same person online as you are offline? Is the version of you on Instagram the same version of you on LinkedIn?

More importantly, we need to think more critically about who owns us. If we choose to live even some minute portion of our lives on Instagram, it’s not we who own that version of us—it’s Meta. Whether we are forging business connections on LinkedIn or personal connections through Bluesky or arguing with racists on NextDoor, we are handing over a small piece of ownership of our externalized, digitized selves.