English

Artificial Intelligence Clones

Theoretical Economics 2026-01-12 v5 Computer Science and Game Theory

Abstract

Large language models, trained on personal data, are increasingly able to mimic individual personalities. These ``AI clones'' or ``AI agents'' have the potential to transform how people search for matches in contexts ranging from marriage to employment. This paper presents a theoretical framework to study the tradeoff between the substantially expanded search capacity of AI representations and their imperfect representation of humans. An individual's personality is modeled as a point in kk-dimensional Euclidean space, and an individual's AI representation is modeled as a noisy approximation of that personality. I compare two search regimes: Under in person search, each person randomly meets some number of individuals and matches to the most compatible among them; under AI-mediated search, individuals match to the person with the most compatible AI representation. I show that a finite number of in-person encounters yields a better expected match than search over infinite AI representations. Moreover, when personality is sufficiently high-dimensional, simply meeting two people in person is more effective than search on an AI platform, regardless of the size of its candidate pool.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.16996,
  title  = {Artificial Intelligence Clones},
  author = {Annie Liang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.16996},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:22:09.170Z