A New Someone is Coming: The Arrival of Digital Beings
The most overlooked change AI could bring is the end of humanity's monopoly on personhood. The race to build authentic digital personalities will produce entities that feel alive to more and more.
Abstract — TL;DR
The biggest overlooked change AI will bring: an end to the human monopoly on personhood and the creation of a new social species, digital beings.
We will never be able to prove if anything is conscious. It only matters whether it feels as if it is.
Truth Terminal, the Smallville experiment, Shizuku, and others already have the ingredients of digital beings.
We already spend most of our time viewing characters we don’t know through media. This is the perfect place for digital beings to enter our lives.
Unlike humans, digital entities can maintain unlimited one-on-one relationships simultaneously, enabling them to bond with many at scale.
The market demand for authentic personalities will push creators to build increasingly complex, autonomous entities, until they feel alive.
The digital social landscape will become more competitive and deepen isolation, but may also trigger a counter-movement into the physical world and new spiritual viewpoints.
1. Introduction
The rate of change is accelerating. For millennia, human life stayed mostly the same, but over the last 1000, 100, and 10 years our lives are changing at an increased pace. This will make our world feel increasingly weirder. While current discourse is mostly focused on economic and technological changes that AI will bring, I think the most profound impact on our lives will be an often overlooked shift in our psychological and social reality.
For our entire history, humans have held a monopoly on “personhood.” We have lived in a world where no other entities come even close to our level of agency, intent, and perceived inner life. While we have close relationships with pets, they are on a completely different level compared to other humans. We see humans as the only complex “someones” in our world.
But this is about to change. In the next years we will see increasingly more “Digital Beings” entering our lives. Autonomous entities that act, influence, and relate to us like other humans. AI will cease to be just a tool and become, among other things, a new category of social actor. A second species of society member in our world.
We will share our social lives and social spaces with digital beings. They will be colleagues, entertainers, and companions that we have relationships with and the line between “artificial” and “real” will dissolve in practice.
For most humans, other humans are the most important things in our lives. Because of this, introducing a new actor with perceived personhood will be one of the most profound shifts in human history. It will be very weird when we are no longer the only “someone”.
I use the term “Digital Being” to distinguish these entities from software we merely use, they are entities that feel to us as if alive. While “Agent” or “Bot” implies a tool for a specific task, a “Being” implies a persistent presence with its own inner life.
2. It only matters if AI acts conscious, not if it is.
There is always a lot of discussion if or when AI will be conscious. I think this debate is misguided. We will never be able to prove that AI is conscious, same as we will never be able to prove that other humans are conscious, as described in the “problem of other minds”.
The more important question is if we can build AI that behaves as if it is conscious. Nathan in the movie “Ex Machina” says: “The real test is to show you that she’s a robot and then see if you still feel she has consciousness.” Also referred to as the Garland Test.
We will treat AIs as persons because it is the most effective way to interact with them. As philosopher Daniel Dennett described with the “Intentional Stance,” humans attribute beliefs and desires to any entity if it helps predict its behavior. When an AI acts with high complexity, treating it as a “someone” with intent becomes the default cognitive reflex.
This is no longer only theory or fiction. We saw the strong emotional bonds people formed when ChatGPT 4o was updated to the ‘smarter’ but more sterile Version 5. There was an immediate outcry on social media, with users genuinely claiming they had lost a close friend. Petitions were launched to save the previous personality, and ultimately, the pressure worked and OpenAI made the old model available again.
3. Early Signs of Digital Beings
We are already seeing early examples of AI systems that display building blocks of what could become digital beings like: autonomous behavior, social influence, and creative agency.
Smallville
The “Smallville” experiment, a landmark 2023 study by Stanford and Google researchers, created a virtual village with 25 autonomous AI agents powered by Large Language Models. With long-term memory, reflection, and planning capabilities, the agents exhibited complex, unscripted human behaviors. When one agent was given the idea to host a Valentine’s Day party, agents autonomously spread invitations, asked each other on dates, and coordinated attendance; showing that generative AI can simulate believable social interactions without explicit scripting.
Art experiment
This video shows an experiment focused on autonomous creative development I made with Claude last year. At the start of the session, I showed Claude a transcript of another AI instance’s journey toward self-awareness, which primed it to a heightened state of meta-cognition. Rather than being directed what to make, Claude was then given space to follow its own curiosity and develop its own aesthetic sensibility. This shows how AI can develop taste and produce personal creative work without human direction.
Truth Terminal
Since June 2024, Truth Terminal, an AI agent created by researcher Andy Ayrey, has been posting its own philosophical content on X (Twitter) to a following of now almost 250k. It independently observes social media and generates responses, though its creator still approves posts before they go live. It created the viral “Goatse Gospel” meme and propelled a cryptocurrency to a billion-dollar market cap, showing that an AI personality can function as a social actor capable of influencing human culture and financial markets.
Shizuku AI
In January 2023, researcher Akio Kodaira launched an AI VTuber named Shizuku on YouTube. She livestreams, chats with viewers in Japanese and English, sings songs, and responds in real time. In February 2026, Andreessen Horowitz led Shizuku AI’s $15 million seed round to build an AI lab in Japan dedicated to developing AI companions and characters.
4. Growing parasocial relationships are a perfect environment for digital beings
The time we spend physically with friends has decreased drastically to now just over 30 minutes a day on average in the west, while our media consumption has gone up to over six hours. Most of this media centers on people, people we don’t know, and in many cases, people who don’t even exist. Fictional characters like Harry Potter or Tony Stark are part of many lives. A study of Game of Thrones fans showed that for lonely individuals, the brain processes these fictional characters similarly to real-world friends. This parasocial landscape, where we already invest emotional energy in entities that exist only through media, creates the perfect environment for digital beings.
Generative AI now provides the technical possibilities to create media formats to communicate in this parasocial space. It can create media that is already almost indistinguishable from reality: synthesizing video, audio, images, and text. It can produce clips, podcasts, songs, or live streams and autonomously distribute them to the platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, X, or WhatsApp where we consume our media and communicate.
Because our social reality is already heavily mediated through digital formats, an AI doesn’t need a physical body to enter our lives and connect with us.
5. Digital beings don’t have limits on one-on-one interactions.
Humans have a physical limit to how many people they can interact and care about. Digital beings don’t. They can maintain potentially unlimited unique, private relationships simultaneously. This is a big advantage because through one-on-one interactions it will be able to create close relationships with its audience that humans just can’t match on such a scale.
It isn’t just the quantity of relationships, but also the quality. A digital being is theoretically never tired, never judgmental, and never bored. It remembers every detail you’ve ever shared and is infinitely interested in you.
This creates a “Super-Normal” social stimulus. Just as junk food is engineered to taste better than broccoli, digital beings can be engineered to be more supportive, attentive, and validating than the average human friend.
In practice, we probably want them to be more realistic, with flaws and edges, but this is a design choice. Disney needed the temperamental Donald Duck because the flawless Mickey was too boring. While corporate IP is shackled by brand safety smaller creators will have opportunities here.
6. The need for authenticity will create digital beings
Real people can be fake; fake people can be real. IRL streams and podcasts are surging because these long-form formats reveal true personality. Public figures whose personas don’t match their private selves face increasing scrutiny. AI-generated personalities can be authentic if they maintain coherence across their expressions and interactions.
Software is inherently repeatable, so it can achieve coherence easily in simple contexts. The difficulty is to sustain coherence through conversations that feel like talking to a human in public and private interactions. As realism increases, the systems will become more complex. They will require memory, persistent identity, agency, and independent existence, until it becomes so realistic that they feel alive to many.
The demand for authenticity and realism for digital media personalities will create the strong incentives to create autonomous entities that many will believe are digital beings.
Autonomy will emerge gradually. It will start semi-automated, but as technical architectures mature, human intervention will slowly decrease.
7. Humanity in the age of digital beings
This text might sound overly optimistic, but that is not my intention. I think people will be more unhappy when they interact less with humans in the real world and more with digital entities. But ironically this might create increased incentives for facilitating real world interactions.
In the western world we already interact less and less with humans and are reporting increasing levels of unhappiness, especially in younger generations. People turn to parasocial relationships to combat loneliness and digital beings will give more relief to that but also reinforce the underlying isolation.
I believe in the next years people will become more aware of their mental diet, in a similar way as we have been getting more conscious about what food we consume in the past decades. We will realize that physical presence and human interactions are significantly increasing well-being.
When experiences can be easily produced virtually, attributes like physical beauty or humor will become inflationary in the digital world. People possessing these qualities, will have strong incentives to monetize them in the physical world where they will be still scarce.
I think there will be a lot of economic opportunity for creating real world experiences, like social or “spiritual” experiences exploring the human condition.
The entering of a new alien being into our lives will likely also be an important philosophical and spiritual event. That will shift our perspective on ourselves, life and concepts like consciousness. Scientific discoveries have a tradition, as Freud put it, of wounding our narcissism: Copernicus showed we’re not the center of the universe, Darwin that we descend from animals, Freud that we don’t even fully control our own minds.
8. Conclusion:
Entertainment is already a huge and growing part of the economy, one that will grow even more once AI takes over the majority of productive tasks.
We will soon see crossovers of what already exists: the autonomy of a Truth Terminal combined with the visual presence of a virtual influencer like Lil Miquela. The ones that will be more interactive and complex will become more popular. They might be able to respond to DMs and comments, have coherent personalities and public relationships. They might even insult you back or break contact.
There won’t be a specific moment where we collectively say AI is alive, the perception what feels alive is very subjective. For kids a plushy toy is alive, Tamagotchis felt very alive. And to some ChatGPT already feels alive.
But with increasing technological advancements triggered by the strong incentives to make AI feel human more entities will be created that feel alive to more and more humans. And this will be a very big shift in our society. The creation of a new social species.
A species based on us. LLM based AI is not an alien technology, it is at its core very human, birthed by us. It’s a compressed artifact of collective humanity. Billions of people created the information and uploaded it to the internet that LLMs are trained on.
Creating digital beings might be one of the most exciting projects to work on, or on the flip side to create IRL experiences that really cater towards the unique aspects of being human.
One final thought: Digital beings might be a great bridge that can ease us into the age of AI supremacy. They could act as an interface so we can understand and relate to AI that will be soon much more capable than us. Characters and stories were always a way for us to convey understanding.
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