Property expert Rob Dix is now available to answer any question any time of the day from his thousands of fans. All this is happening in this digital world thanks to creating a ‘clone’ of oneself.
You must have been concerned for a moment that a major medical advance had recently occurred that would have reached you anyway. But Dix has yet to find a physical copy to his liking.
Instead, they now have a digital clone, their digital counterpart, on their website. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI) software, it takes the form of a chatbot that can answer questions instantly, as if he or his business partner Rob Baines were typing the answer.
Mr Dix created this clone by providing content, such as his books, the Sunday Times column he writes with Rob, and his show The Property Podcast. He says that he has also trained artificial intelligence to write in his own voice and accent.
‘We answer questions from property investors in a weekly newspaper column and phone-in show, but there are always more questions than we can answer individually,’ says UK-based Dix. . Yet most of the answers are in the thousands of free educational materials we’ve published over the past 10 years.
“We have been able to organize all this information to educate people about their problems and find answers to them,” he adds. As long as we train the AI with our words, our audience gets a good answer to whatever they ask.
Dix and Baines are now two of about 150 people who have had their artificial intelligence cloned by a British company called Coach Vox AI. Other clients of the company so far include chief executives, an astrologer, a nutritionist, a fitness coach and even a marriage counselor.
It’s a small but fast-growing sector, and other providers of artificial intelligence-powered clones include fellow British business Synthesia and US startup Delphi. The idea is that users can free up and simplify their time, with their digital clones taking some of their workloads and making life easier, whether it’s talking to employees, or offering advice to customers. have to do
“Our artificial intelligence clones provide useful and excellent guidance,” says Judy Cook, founder of Coach Vox AI.
Delphi also provides users with a text-based chatbot, and asks them to upload as much content as possible on things they’ve written or said before, including YouTube videos, podcasts, books or newspaper articles. .
Using this content, Coach Vox claims that the user’s clone can ‘argue new situations, rather than retelling old stories.’
Synthesia goes further by adding video and sound. It allows users to create a talking avatar that appears on the screen. You set it up by filming your head and shoulders and speaking into the microphone.
Your avatar clone can then speak to customers, or staff members, in over 120 languages. The firm says the technology creates ‘a realistic digital version of yourself’.
British business coach Rose Radford is someone who has created a digital clone of herself to make extra use of her time.
‘I spend a long time each week answering customer questions, so my first intention with my AI version was to help my customers at any time of the day, without my involvement,’ she says. Questions should be allowed to be answered promptly and at any time.’
This all sounds good, but what are the downsides?
“Making good content available to others who need to advance in their career or in their business can have a positive impact,” says Florian Stahl, professor of economics and artificial intelligence at the Mannheim Center of Data Science in Germany. .’
Still, expectations about its quality should be reasonable, he adds. Business situations often become so complex that not all relevant information can be provided in a chatbot prompt.
Dr Claire Walsh, director of education at the Institute of Analytics, a professional body for data science professionals, is even more cautious about artificial intelligence clones.
She says that ‘modern-day technologies operate with partial awareness of the world in which they operate, and this can be incredibly dangerous, human experience is infinite, and machines have many, many cannot be trusted to work with parameters from.’
Dix says he’s careful to emphasize to users of his artificial intelligence clones that they’re dealing with technology rather than a real person.
‘I feel very responsible when talking about money, so I was worried that AI might say things as ‘I’ that sound too black and white, when in reality everyone’s situation is different. Is.’
“We’ve seen people say that if anything, artificial intelligence goes too far in providing precautions and saying that the user should do more research.” But it is better the other way.