Billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has recently released a video ‘interview’ with his new digital avatar, Reid AI. Built on a custom GPT trained on two decades’ worth of Hoffman’s books, articles, speeches, interviews, and podcasts, Reid AI utilizes speech and video deepfake technology to create a digital clone capable of approximating its source subject’s mannerisms and conversational tone. For over 14 minutes, you can watch the two Hoffmans gaze lovingly and dead-eyed, respectively, into the tech industry’s uncanny navel. In doing so, viewers aren’t offered a “way to be better, to be more human,” as the real Hoffman argues—but a way towards a misguided, dangerous, unethical, and hollow future.
Many people might shudder at the idea of unleashing a talking, animated AI avatar of themselves into the world, but the tech utopian “city of yesterday” investor sounds absolutely jazzed about it. According to an April 24 blog post, he finds the whole prospect so “interesting and thought-provoking,” in fact, that he recently partnered with generative AI video company Hour One and the AI audio startup 11ElevenLabs to make it happen. (If that latter name sounds familiar, it’s because 11ElevenLabs’ product is what scammers misused to create those audio deepfake Biden robocalls earlier this year.)
After teasing a showcase of his digital clone for months, Hoffman finally revealed a (heavily edited) video conversation between himself and “Reid AI” last week. And what does the cutting-edge, deepfake-animated culmination of a custom built GPT-4 chatbot reportedly trained on all things Hoffman? A solid question—and one that isn’t easy to answer after watching the surreal, awkward, and occasionally unhygienic simulated interaction.
“Why would I want to be interviewed by a digital version of…
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