I Made ChatGPT Come Alive As Myself

My First Attempt at “Cloning” Myself

Danny Forest
5 min readAug 10, 2023
Screenshot of my first prototype

Back in 2017, I was working 12-hour days from a co-working/co-living space in Siem Reap, Cambodia. I was working on a (way too ambitious) video game project for my startup.

Even though I was working remotely abroad, I really didn’t have a life. I’d wake up at around 6am and finish work at around 7pm, with an hour’s lunch in between.

I was grinding, and grinding, and grinding.

Feels familiar?

One day I thought: wouldn’t it be nice to clone myself so I don’t have to work as much?

Not a very original thought I know, but the difference with me is that I didn’t leave it at that. I asked myself: “How would I be able to clone myself?”

But first, what would that even mean?

At the time, it meant a few things. The clone should:

  1. Code like me (or better);
  2. Write like me (or better);
  3. Talk like me; and
  4. See like me.

Over the course of the next few days, I started designing how exactly I would be able to do that.

You can imagine, pre-GPT, my solution was a lot more complicated and ambitious. Without going into…

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Danny Forest

Polymath. Life Optimizer. Learner. Entrepreneur. Engineer. Writer.