After obtaining an interactive avatar and training it to discuss venture fraud, I have mixed feelings about making AI clones of ourselves.

When Alexandru Voica, head of corporate affairs at the video-generation startup Synthesia, sent me a link to their newest PR team member — an interactive virtual avatar of him — I was surprised. The day before, I was on a panel where PR people asked if I minded AI-generated text pitches. But Alexandru's avatar was beyond that — this seemed to me the final boss of using AI in PR.

In September, Synthesia invited me to its new office in New York. Originally based in the U.K., Synthesia is a hot digital avatar startup alongside others like D-ID, Hey Gen, and Colossyan. It hit a $4 billion valuation earlier this year and said last year it had crossed $100 million in ARR.

To make this, I entered a mini film studio at Synthesia's office where they took numerous photos of me and captured a two-minute recording of my voice. I had to consent to these avatars being made, and well, digital me was born. The voice-to-text model turns what people say into text, the agentic language model makes sense of text and can take actions based on it, the text-to-voice model turns a response into audio, and finally a video model animates the avatar as it talks.