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

• 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.

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

The research was led by Joon Sung Park, a Stanford PhD student. The idea behind creating these…