I created an interactive digital avatar of myself — and you can talk to it

The author created an interactive digital avatar modeled on himself and trained it to talk about venture fraud. The experiment left him with mixed feelings about how convincing and useful AI clones of real people may become.

Personal avatars could become a new interface for expertise, media, and education, letting audiences interact with a person’s knowledge at scale. But the discomfort highlights unresolved risks around consent, authenticity, and digital identity as synthetic versions of people become easier to produce.