AI can now clone your personality in only two hours – and that's a dream for deepfake scammers

A computer screen showing a person being cloned
(Image credit: Getty Images / Vesalainen)

  • New study trained AI models on answers given in a two-hour interview
  • AI could replicate participants’ responses with 85% accuracy
  • Agents could be used instead of humans in future research studies

You might think your personality is unique, but all it takes is a two-hour interview for an AI model to create a virtual replica with your attitudes and behaviors. That’s according to a new paper published by researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind.

What are simulation agents?

A man standing in front a digital clone of himself through a frame

(Image credit: Getty Images / Mikkelwilliam)

Simulation agents are described by the paper as generative AI models that can accurately simulate a person's behavior 'across a range of social, political, or informational contexts'.

In the study, 1,052 participants were asked to complete a two-hour interview which covered a wide range of topics, from their personal life story to their views on contemporary social issues. Their responses were recorded and the script was used to train generative AI models – or “simulation agents” – for each individual.

To test how well these agents could mimic their human counterparts, both were asked to complete a set of tasks, including personality tests and games. Participants were then asked to replicate their own answers a fortnight later. Remarkably, the AI agents were able to simulate answers with 85% accuracy compared to the human participants.

What’s more, the simulation agents were similarly effective when asked to predict personality traits across five social science experiments.

While your personality might seem like an intangible or unquantifiable thing, this research shows that it's possible to distill your value structure from a relatively small amount of information, by capturing qualitative responses to a fixed set of questions. Fed this data, AI models can convincingly imitate your personality – at least, in a controlled, test-based setting. And that could make deepfakes even more dangerous.

Double agent

A hand holding a phone showing a person being cloned

(Image credit: Getty Images / Vesalainen)

The research was led by Joon Sung Park, a Stanford PhD student. The idea behind creating these simulation agents is to give social science researchers more freedom when conducting studies. By creating digital replicas which behave like the real people they’re based on, scientists can run studies without the expense of bringing in thousands of human participants every time.

You can have a bunch of small ‘yous’ running around and actually making the decisions that you would have made.

Joon Sung Park, Stanford PhD student

They may also be able to run experiments which would be unethical to conduct with real human participants. Speaking to MIT Technology Review, John Horton, an associate professor of information technologies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said that the paper demonstrates a way you can “use real humans to generate personas which can then be used programmatically/in-simulation in ways you could not with real humans.”

Whether study participants are morally comfortable with this is one thing. More concerning for many people will be the potential for simulation agents to become something more nefarious in the future. In that same MIT Technology Review story, Park predicted that one day “you can have a bunch of small ‘yous’ running around and actually making the decisions that you would have made.”

For many, this will set dystopian alarm bells ringing. The idea of digital replicas opens up a realm of security, privacy and identity theft concerns. It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to foresee a world where scammers – who are already using AI to imitate the voices of loved-ones – could build personality deepfakes to imitate people online.

This is particularly concerning when you consider that the AI simulation agents were created in the study using just two hours of interview data. This is much less than the amount of information currently required by companies such as Tavus, which create digital twins based on a trove of user data.

You might also like...

Chris Rowlands

Formerly News Editor at Stuff, Chris now writes about tech from his tropical office. Sidetracked by sustainable stuff, he’s also keen on cameras, classic cars and any gear that gets better with age.

Read more
A humanoid android holding a human skull in its hand.
One conversation is all it takes for this AI to deepfake your entire personality
Life's Echo
Now AI can keep you alive after you’re gone, and it’s as creepy as it sounds
Meta AI on a smartphone
Meta wants to fill your social media feeds with bots – here's why I think it's wrong
AI
I tried the most realistic AI voice companion ever created - if ChatGPT or Gemini ever gets this good, reality is in trouble
An AI-generated image of the colosseum with slides coming out of it.
AI slop is taking over the internet and I've had enough of it
ChatGPT logo with circuitry in the background.
OpenAI’s new Deep Research is the ChatGPT AI agent we’ve been waiting for – 3 reasons why I can’t wait to use it
Latest in Artificial Intelligence
Two business men playing chess in the office.
It turns out ChatGPT o1 and DeepSeek-R1 cheat at chess if they’re losing, which makes me wonder if I should I should trust AI with anything
Google Gemini Calendar
Gemini is coming to Google Calendar, here’s how it will work and how to try it now
Netflix
Netflix tried to fix 80s sitcom A Different World with AI but it gave us a different nightmare
Pictory
What is Pictory: Everything we know about this business-focussed AI video generator
A toy Amazon Echo next to the Alexa Plus logo and a range of Echo devices
What is Alexa+: Amazon’s next-generation assistant is powered by generative-AI
Gaming with AI
I asked Gemini to play a text-based adventure game with me and the AI whisked me away to a word-based fantasy
Latest in News
A close up of Captain America with Thor and Hulk in the background during the Assemble scene in Avengers: Endgame
'We will draw inspiration': Joe and Anthony Russo reveal which of Marvel's Secret Wars comic book series have influenced Avengers 5 and 6's plot
Ai tech, businessman show virtual graphic Global Internet connect Chatgpt Chat with AI, Artificial Intelligence.
Nation-state threats are targeting UK AI research
An AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT made by Sapphire on a table with its retail packaging
Want to buy an RX 9070 or 9070 XT but fed up of the GPUs being out of stock? AMD promises that “more supply is coming ASAP”
Cece Carroway (Sara Silva), Caroline Merteuil (Sarah Catherine Hook), and Lucien Belmont (Zac Burgess) in Cruel Intentions.
Cruel Intentions has been canceled after one season on Prime Video, but I'm not surprised by its cruel fate
iOS 18 Control Center
iOS 19: the 3 biggest rumors so far, and what I want to see
Doom: The Dark Ages
Doom: The Dark Ages' director confirms DLC is in the works and says the game won't end the way 2016's Doom begins: 'If we took it all the way to that point, then that would mean that we couldn't tell any more medieval stories'