How to make an AI version of yourself (free, in about ten minutes)

Making an AI version of yourself stopped being science fiction and became a form you fill in. The interesting question isn't whether you can — it's whether the result actually sounds like you, tells the truth, and does something useful. This is the process that gets you there, tool-agnostic first, with hiy as the worked example.

Step 1: Gather material you actually made#

An AI version of you is only as real as its inputs. The best material is things you wrote or said at length, in your own voice:

• Long-form writing — blog posts, newsletters, essays. One meaty piece beats ten tweets.
• Talk and video transcripts — a YouTube channel is a goldmine; the transcript carries your phrasing, not just your facts.
• Your résumé or About page — the skeleton of who you are.
• Notes and answers you've already written — that email you've sent fifteen times is premium training material.

What not to feed it: other people's writing, filler you don't stand behind, and anything confidential. Everything you add is something your AI self may repeat.

Step 2: Ground it — don't just prompt it#

There are two ways tools build "an AI you." The cheap way is a personality prompt: "answer as if you were X." It sounds like a horoscope of you and invents freely. The right way is grounding: your material is indexed, and every answer is drawn from — and checkably tied to — what you actually made. If the tool you're evaluating can't show which source an answer came from, it's doing the cheap way. (Here's how grounding works in hiy — every grounded answer opens to the exact passage.)

Step 3: Interview yourself for voice#

Facts make it accurate; voice makes it you. A short personality interview — how you greet people, how blunt you are, phrases you actually use — is the single biggest upgrade to whether the twin reads like you or like a support agent wearing your name.

Step 4: Test it like a stranger would#

Before anything goes public, ask it the five questions people actually ask you — and one it can't know. The last one is the important test: the right answer is "I don't know", in your tone. An AI version of you that guesses is worse than none, because it makes things up in your name.

Step 5: Publish on your terms, then teach it#

Publish behind your own link, put it in your bio, or embed it on your site. Then watch what it couldn't answer: those gaps are real questions from your real audience. Answer each one once, and a good tool makes your answer permanent and authoritative.

Doing it with hiy#

The above takes about ten minutes on hiy: paste one strong source (no account needed for a 24-hour preview), take the two-minute interview, test privately, claim hiy.ai/your-name, publish. Free includes a real published twin with citations and honest gaps — the parts that make it trustworthy are never the paid parts. Want to feel the end result before you start? Talk to Demo Sam, a fully built example.