Copilot for Everything: Training your AI replacement one keystroke at a time

That only captures your output, not your input. The best people to simulate in this world would be so-called terminally online people virtually all of whom's input is itself online. So for those who've read a lot of paper books or done a lot of traveling or had a lot of offline conversations or relationships, I think it would be difficult to truly simulate someone.

That is interesting.

I can imagine replicating my speaking/typing mannerisms quite well if I think about stages in my life. Maybe a yearly snapshot, so I could talk to my self as a teen, college student, early professional, etc.

Seems likely, given the number of models already fine tuned on notable historical figures.

Not sure if it makes it better or worse that most of us are probably mostly useful as virtual focus groups / crowds rather than any particular interest in you or me as individuals.

Our social media personas are also tiny subsets of our actual personalities. I think most people don't reveal their full character in any one medium.

now phone conversations—that would be a goldmine and a nightmare.

I’ll hope so. Much worse would be if one’s public content gets erased from history.

I fear the loss of original sources when LLMs get placed in between. We already have the unresolved issue that the training data is partly illegal and can’t be published. Accessing information through LLMs is much more efficient and is great progress but it’s build in to censor parts of the source information and likely the censored information is lost in transition.

Somehow there should be a global data vault initiative, where at least the most important information about our human endeavour is stored. It gives me a chill down my spine when I hear that content from the internet archive is being deleted on request erased from history..

I made a custom GPT of myself using my blog. It understood who I am, but wasn't able to replicate me very well, and mostly sounded like generic ChatGPT with some added interest in my interests.

I would imagine fine tuning with enough data would be different though

The vast majority of my communication is not in text. Most of what I have written or typed is not in anyone's database. I'm not sure how that compares to others.

The first time I changed a system prompt, I changed it to "You are George Carlin." So, I think we're already doing that, in a way.

That wacky article in the NY Times where Sergey Brin recommends everyone at Google put in 60 hours a week had a bit about how hey thinks all employees need to be using their AI products more:

He highlighted the need for Google’s employees to use more of its A.I. for coding, saying the A.I.’s improving itself would lead to A.G.I. He also called on employees working on Gemini to be “the most efficient coders and A.I. scientists in the world by using our own A.I.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/technology/google-sergey-...

then if you leave or are let go, you are leaving a significant part of yourself behind that you cannot take with you.

I suspect that's "a feature, not a bug" in the company's view.

Also the 'agent' features. Our company has been blocking all agent features from regular employee access because they don't want random users building their own automations. This kind of stuff requires care and an eye for regulations like GDPR.

To permit this as Microsoft wants would lead to a lot of shadow IT. Which will be really hard to get rid of. I compare it to lotus notes which beside being an email client was also a competent database. Over the decades we used it users built up a huge library of hobby tools, many of which wormed their way into critical business processes. Making it really difficult to move away to another solution because the people that knew how it worked were long gone.

I suspect this is exactly what Microsoft wants. Us being locked into copilot so they can charge ever more for it. This is kinda their business model anyway.

Under the hood it's really not that special, it's just ChatGPT. Some special sauce to make it talk to office 365 but that's about it.

Anecdote: I recently opened VScode on my personal laptop for the first time in a year or two and, having got used to the internal AI assistance we have at work, my own non-AI-enhanced VScode felt so primitive. Like using Win95-era notepad.exe or something.

It was palpable - that was "a moment" for me. Programming has changed.

Local, open source models are the answer to this. You never lose access and should be able to grow with you for years.

Is it that different from corporate culture? Someone who makes big contributions to culture is extremely valuable, and that’s left behind as well.

I could see evaluation of one’s ability to contribute to training corpus being just as important as cultural contribution (e.g. leadership, team building, etc).

> Maybe it will apply to the C-Suite...

Of course it won't, though those roles are probably the most suited to being replaced by a not-so-bright chatbot.

I had a similar thought recently[0], though I was thinking about it more from the copyright side. I think there needs to be some kind of additional tax taken from AI profits, possibly justified by copyrights, because otherwise the economic impact might end up being nuts.

[0] https://jackson.dev/post/generative-ai-and-copyright/

Your inherent value as a data source becomes the justification for UBI

> What is the point in replicating an employee when the AI could be better than all the employees?

Wishful thinking at this point in time.

True, AI can be more productive, but as a starting point, fully automating a remote engineering seat is at the very least a great experiment.

Wouldn't be the first time Google is doing something like this. See recaptcha and building numbers.

There's nothing preventing people from creating employee-owned co-ops. In fact there are some large and successful ones, like WinCo.

We did learn an economic lesson from countries that tried to make employee ownership of the means of production mandatory, and more especially we learned lessons from the mountains of skulls those countries left behind.

This is a fair point. I remember the default chat setting was to delete all chats after 24 hours. I think emails had a similar retention policy — they were automatically after a year or something like that.