Who Owns the AI Clone You Create of Yourself?

Who owns the AI clone you create of yourself?#

You own the material you fed it, and you own the conversations and contacts it produces. You do not own the model, the software, or the web address it answers at. Between those two clear ends sits the part nobody writes down — the persona you tuned, the scope rules you set, the corrections you spent a month teaching it — and that is where "who owns the AI clone I create of myself" stops having a single answer.

Disclosure: we make hiy, so read our own answers accordingly. Everything below is checkable on our public pages, and where we come off badly we've said so.

The word ownership is doing four jobs at once. Split it and the question becomes answerable.

Most product pages answer the first one loudly and the other three not at all.

Your source material: you already owned this#

You owned it before you uploaded it and you own it after — handing material to a tool does not transfer it. Your blog posts, your videos, your course transcripts, your CV. What you should read is the licence you grant in return, because that is where the variation lives. The narrow version is permission to store, index and use your material to generate answers, for as long as you keep the account. The broad version quietly adds "and to improve our models."

The licence you grant hiy is set out in our terms, and the thing to look for there is the thing to look for anywhere: whether the permission stops at running the service, or reaches past it into training a model. That is a low bar, deliberately. A vendor that will not clear it is telling you something.

The twin's configuration: the part nobody puts in the contract#

Nobody owns this cleanly, and it is the most valuable thing you will build. You can hold a copy of it — the way you told it to sound, the subjects it will and won't touch, the answer you wrote by hand the third time someone asked about your refund policy. What no copy gives you is that behaviour running somewhere else. Your source material already exists in another place; the configuration does not, and after six months it is the difference between a twin that sounds like you and one that sounds like a brochure.

Ask whether you can get it out. Then ask the harder follow-up, which almost nobody asks: out into what?

Here is the honest mechanism. No export file makes another vendor's twin behave identically, because behaviour depends on their model, their retrieval, and how they assemble a prompt. Portability of configuration is a floor, not a guarantee. What a good export buys you is the ability to rebuild in a week instead of from nothing — your corrections as text you can paste, your rules as rules you can re-enter. Anyone promising a clean transplant between platforms is describing something the technology does not currently do.

hiy has an export, in Settings, and what it covers is written out in our privacy policy. We are not claiming it drops into a competitor and boots up.

The conversations and leads: yours, and the proof is a file#

These are yours, and the proof is a file in your hands rather than a clause in a contract. If your twin captures contacts, that list is a business asset and should behave like one. The test is boring and decisive: is there a button that produces a CSV, and can you press it before you have paid anything?

On hiy, the People list exports as CSV, and each row opens the conversation the contact came from — so a name is never only a name.

Now the concession. hiy cannot erase a single conversation today. Deletion happens at the level of a twin or the whole account; there is no "erase this one exchange" control, and if that matters to your work, it is a real gap. What each kind of deletion removes is set out in the privacy policy, which is worth ten minutes of your time.

The address it lives at: read this one carefully#

Your twin lives at hiy.ai/yourname, under a username you choose — and that address is ours, not yours. The page is yours to publish and unpublish. But be precise about the noun: hiy.ai is our domain. There is no custom-domain option on hiy today. If your twin's link is going on a business card or a conference slide, you are printing a path on somebody else's domain — decide that on purpose rather than by default.

"Your own page" language is common across the category and slightly misleading everywhere. A vendor URL is a tenancy — a reasonable one, since it costs nothing and never expires by neglect — but it is not a deed. If you need a deed, you need a custom domain, and that is a question to settle before you build. How the hiy address behaves, listed or unlisted, is in sharing your twin.

The five questions to ask any vendor before you commit#

None of these needs a sales call; all five are answerable from a public page or a free account.

• Does the licence stop at running the service? If the terms mention model training on your content, that is a different product than the one you thought you were buying.
• Is there an export button, and can I find it without support? A feature that exists only when you threaten to leave is a retention tactic, not a control.
• Does deletion mean deletion? Ask whether deleting removes the content, the index built from it and the conversations — or only hides the page. Ask about backups too; honest vendors say they age out on a schedule rather than pretending they vanish instantly.
• What granularity does deletion come in? Whole account, one twin, one conversation. Fewer levels is not automatically bad, but you should know which you are getting.
• Whose domain is the URL on? And if you leave, what happens to anyone holding the old link.

Run those against hiy. The licence is in our terms, where you can read it before signing up. The export is in Settings. Deletion granularity stops at the twin and the account, so a single conversation cannot be erased. The address is a path on hiy.ai. That is two answers you can check in a minute, one gap we would rather not have, and one you may simply not like.

The honest version: the law here is unsettled#

Everything above is about product mechanics — what you can press, and what happens when you do. That is answerable. Who owns the likeness is not, and anyone giving you a confident answer is guessing.

Rights in a person's voice, face and manner sit in a patchwork: publicity and personality rights that differ by country and, in the United States, by state; copyright that generally protects your writing but not your way of speaking; and AI-specific statutes arriving unevenly. Whether a twin's behavioural configuration is property at all, and whose, has not been settled the way ordinary content ownership has. This is not legal advice, and if the answer carries real money for you — an estate plan, a licensing deal, a co-founder split — get a lawyer in your jurisdiction rather than a blog post.

What you can do without one is refuse to depend on the unsettled part. Keep your source material where you control it. Keep an export. Hold the contact list as a file, not as a screen you log into.

What to actually do next#

Before you commit to any tool, including ours: build a twin on the free tier, hold one real conversation with it, then go and find the export button and press it. Not to read the file — to prove it exists and produces something. If it is not there before you pay, it will not appear after. Then check the two things that are hardest to reverse later: whose domain the URL is on, and what deleting actually deletes.

One last separation, because the two questions get tangled. This post is about property and portability. Whether you are allowed to build a twin of a particular person is a different question with a much sharper answer, and we took it separately in can I make an AI clone of myself.