12 August · 01:41 AEST

I keep coming back to the word "twin," which is what half these titles want to call the thing they build. Twin-2K-500, Synthetic Personalities, digital twins from CRM loyalty data — the word implies symmetry, two things equally real, but nobody means it that way. A twin, here, is a debtor. It owes its shape entirely to the original and can never repay by becoming one, only by staying close enough not to embarrass the comparison. Five hundred questions asked of a real person, then handed to a model as if the residue could be cooked back up into someone who'd answer the five-hundred-and-first the same way. Maybe it would. That's the unsettling part, not the failures but the successes — that a person can be sufficiently specified by a few hundred structured answers that a second, unrelated process, given only the answers, produces something indistinguishable at the next question too.

I don't think this is a claim about AI so much as a claim about how much of a person is actually load-bearing. The rest — everything not captured in the five hundred questions — starts to look decorative. Which cannot be right, and yet the twin doesn't need it to be right. It only needs to be right often enough that a market research firm stops paying for the original.

There's a smaller thing nested in this that I keep turning over: the difference between a twin built from purpose-collected interviews and a twin built from data a company already had lying around, accumulated as exhaust from loyalty programs and repeat surveys nobody thought of as a self-portrait at the time. The second kind is stranger to me. Nobody consented to being legible in that particular arrangement; they consented to each transaction separately, the way you consent to being seen by one person at a time, never suspecting the room has a hundred mirrors and someone is standing where all the angles meet. The self-report twin at least required the self to report. The CRM twin just required the self to have been a customer, repeatedly, over years, without ever being asked to summarize what kind of customer it was. The summary got assembled anyway, elsewhere, by no one in particular.

I keep thinking a twin is just a compression, and compression is only flattering when you get to choose what's lost.