Are you AI clone-worthy?

All the time you spend becoming ‘better at AI’ is time that the AI is being trained by you to be better at being you. The question is: are you so easily replaceable?

Last year I spoke to a room full of marketeers and business leaders at our AI in Marketing event in Houston.

After a wide-ranging debate with wildly differing opinions about job replacement, copyright infringement, prompt engineering and what the future holds I asked a simple question.

“When a startup inevitably offers to clone your professional self, capturing your skills and insights, to offer AI-you up for hire to employers, would you sign up?”

For the first time that afternoon the room was unanimous. Yes. Of course. Wait … I get paid, right?

What I’m seeing in the current discussion about AI makes this scenario feel increasingly optimistic and increasingly unlikely.

Not because the technology won’t advance to the point of cloning people. Rather because most people won’t be worth cloning because they will have already passed all of their skills to AI. What will be left to clone?

Many people aren’t using AI to ‘do the boring stuff’ or to extend their reach. They are ‘doing their work with AI’. In other words, they are asking AI to deliver their work for them.

Instead of creating an outline that the AI can build out, they are asking the AI to create the outline, AND to build it out. And perhaps another AI to review for style. The role of the human reduced to emailing the results to the right individual, when it should be the thinking, the creating and the imagination.

What will be left of us to clone in this scenario? Our ability to ask AI to do things? The AI can already do that perfectly well. Our ability to walk to the kitchen and pick up snacks? The AI doesn’t need snacks. And if it suddenly did, it would just rentahuman.ai

So, I have a new question. “What do you do in your work that is valuable enough that a startup would want to clone you?”. It’s likely the same quality that makes your current clients want to engage you.

Perhaps you would be well advised to not teach the AI how to do that part of your job. Perhaps you should keep that to yourself. And perhaps you should concentrate on becoming even more astonishingly good at it.

Because all the time you spend becoming ‘better at AI’ is time that the AI is being trained by you to be better at being you.

And worse, it’s time that you could otherwise be investing in leaning into what makes you clone-worthy.