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 30 minutes of audio. You can even create a basic clone with just 10 seconds of speech. ElevenLabs makes you record a consent clip in order to ensure that you’re not trying to deepfake a third party.
In a few hours, my professional voice clone was ready. Using it is shockingly easy. ElevenLabs provides an interface that looks a lot like ChatGPT. You enter what you want your clone to say, press a button, and in seconds, your digital twin voice speaks the exact words you typed out.
I had my digital twin record an audio update about this article for my Fast Company editor. He described it as “terrifyingly realistic.” Then, I sent a clip to my mom. She responded, “It would have fooled me.”
In my natural habitat
I was extremely impressed with the voice clone. I could use it right away to spin up an entire AI-generated podcast, prank my friends, or maybe even hack into my bank.
But I didn’t just want a voice. I wanted a full Digital Tom that I could bend to my will.
For the next stage in my cloning experiment, I turned to Synthesia. I originally met Synthesia’s CEO Victor Riparbelli in 2019 at a photo industry event, when his company was a scrappy startup. Today, it’s worth $4 billion.
Synthesia specializes in creating digital “Avatars”—essentially video clones of a real person. Just as with ElevenLabs, you can type text into an interface and get back a video of your avatar reading it aloud, complete with realistic facial expressions and lip movement.
I started a Synthesia trial account and set about creating my personal avatar. Synthesia asked for access to my webcam, and then recorded me reading a preset script off the screen for about 10 minutes.
A day later, my avatar was ready. It was a perfect digital clone of my likeness, right down to the shirt I was wearing on the day I made it and my (overly long) winter haircut. It even placed me in my natural habitat: my comfy, cluttered home office.
As with my voice clone, I could type in any text I could imagine, and in about 10 minutes I would receive a video of Digital Tom reading it aloud.
Synthesia even duplicated the minutiae of my presenting style, right down to my smile and tendency to look to the camera every few seconds when reading a script from the screen.
If I recorded a video with Digital Tom for my YouTube channel, I’m certain most users would have no idea it’s a fake.
The value of people
My experiment shows that today’s AI cloning technology is extremely impressive. I could easily create mountains of audio content with my clone from ElevenLabs, or create an entire social media channel with my Digital Tom as the star.
The bigger question, though, is why I’d want to.
Sure, there are tons of good use cases for working with a digital twin.
Again, Synthesia specializes in creating corporate training videos. Companies can rapidly create specialized teaching materials without renting a studio, hiring a videographer, and shooting countless takes of a talking head in front of a green screen.
They can also edit them by altering a few written words—for example, if a product feature changes subtly.
For their part, ElevenLabs does a brisk business in audiobooks and customer service agents. But they also provide helpful services, like creating accessible, read-aloud versions of web pages for visually impaired users.
But my experiment convinced me that there are fewer good reasons to work with your digital twin.
In an internet landscape where anyone can spin up a thousand-page website in a few minutes using Gemini, and compelling videos are a dime a dozen, thanks to Sora, content is cheap. There are not many good ways left for users to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Personality is one of the few remaining ones. People like to follow people. For creators, developing a personal relationship with your audience is the best way to keep them consuming your content, instead of cheaper (and often better) AI alternatives.
Compromising that by shoving an undisclosed digital twin in their face, however convincing it might be, seems like the fastest possible way to ruin that relationship.
People want to hear from the meat-based Thomas Smith, even if the artificial intelligence version never forgets a word or gets interrupted by his chickens mid-video.
I could see using one of ElevenLab’s or Synthesia’s built-in characters to create (fully disclosed) content. But I can’t see putting my digital twins to real-world use.
I can see one use for the tech, though. It struck me during my experiment that the best reason to build an AI digital twin isn’t to replace your voice or likeness, but to preserve it.
I sometimes lose my voice, and it’s incredibly disruptive to my content production. If I was ever affected by a vocal disorder and lost it permanently, it’s nice to know that there’s a highly realistic backup sitting on ElevenLabs’ servers.
It’s also cool to think that in 10 years—when I’m inevitably older and wrinklier than today—I could bring my 2026 Digital Tom back to life. He’d be frozen in time, a perfect replica of my appearance, mannerisms, and environment in this specific moment, recallable for all eternity.
I won’t be using Digital Tom to augment my YouTube channel, get into podcasting, or read my kids a bedtime story anytime soon. But there’s a strange part of me that’s happy he’s out there, just in case.
