I cloned a ‘digital twin’ of myself with AI. He’s convincing enough to fool my mom

I was born an only child, but now I have a twin . He’s an exact duplicate of me —down to my clothing, my home, my facial expressions, and even my voice. I built him with AI , and I can make him say whatever I want. He’s so convincing that he could fool my own mother. Here’s how I built him —and what AI digital twins mean for the future of people. Deepfake yourself From the moment generative AI was born, criminals started using it to trick people. Deepfakes were one of the first widespread uses of the tech. Today, they’re a scourge to celebrities and even everyday teenagers , and a massive problem for anyone interested in the truth. As criminals were leveraging deepfakes to scam and blackmail people, though, a set of white-hat companies started quietly putting similar digital cloning technologies to use for good. Want to record a training video for your team, and then change a few words without needing to reshoot the whole thing? Want to turn your 400-page Stranger Things fanfic into an audiobook without spending 10 hours of your life reading it aloud? Digital cloning tech has you covered. You basically deepfake yourself—cloning your likeness, your voice, or both—and then mobilize your resulting “digital twin” to create mountains of content just as easily as you’d prompt ChatGPT or Claude. I wanted to try the tech out for myself. So I fired up today’s best AI cloning tools and made Digital Tom—a perfect digital copy of myself. Hear me out I decided to start by cloning my voice. A person’s voice feels like an especially intimate, personal thing. Think back on a loved one you’ve lost. I’ll bet you can remember exactly how they sounded. You can probably even remember a specific, impactful conversation you had with them. Cloning a voice—with all the nuance of accent, speaking style, pitch, and breath—is also a tough technical challenge. People are fast to forgive crappy video, chalking up errors or glitchiness in deepfakes to a spotty internet connection or an old webcam. Content creators everywhere produce bad video every day without any help from AI! A bad AI voice sounds way creepier, though. It’s easier to land in the uncanny valley unless every aspect of a voice clone is perfect. To avoid that fate, I turned to ElevenLabs . The company has been around since 2022 but has exploded in popularity over the last year, with its valuation doubling to more than $6.6 billion. ElevenLabs excels at handling audio—if you’ve listened to an AI-narrated audiobook, interacted with a speaking character in a video game, or heard sound effects in a TV show or movie, it’s a good bet you’ve inadvertently experienced ElevenLabs’ tech. To clone my own voice, I shelled out $22 for a Creator account. I then uploaded about 90 minutes of recordings from my YouTube channel to the ElevenLabs interface. The company says you can create a professional voice clone with as little as...

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