Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
Meta announced it is building an AI clone of Mark Zuckerberg trained on his voice, his mannerisms, and his public thinking on company strategy, so that any of the company’s 79,000 employees can interact with a simulation of the man whose net worth exceeds the GDP of most of the countries whose labor laws he is circumventing. The rationale, according to a person familiar with the project, is that employees could “feel more connected” to Zuckerberg. Meta has not disclosed whether the AI will replicate the specific kind of connection employees reported feeling, specifically regarding Zuckerberg downsizing 21,000 of them since 2022.
Is this the Real Zuck or Clone Zuck? It's actually Wax Zuck. Maybe. It's hard to tell. (Kayco/depositphotos)
The digital clone is separate from a second internal project called the “CEO agent,” a personalized AI system trained on years of internal data, engineering roadmaps, and past operational decisions. The CEO agent helps Zuckerberg retrieve company information faster. The AI clone helps employees retrieve Zuckerberg faster. Meta sees no redundancy here. Both projects are reportedly being developed alongside an internal tool called My Claw, which accesses employees’ chat histories and work documents and can communicate with colleagues on their behalf, and Second Brain, which indexes project files and responds to queries. It’s a portfolio of names that suggests Meta’s product team has never met a science-fiction cliché it wouldn’t greenlight.
The company believes the Zuckerberg experiment can be replicated by influencers and creators, which is the part where this narrator suggests you pay closer attention. Meta’s ad platform, Advantage+, is moving toward full automation by the end of 2026. Advertisers input a URL and a budget, and AI handles creative, targeting, and placement. Sixty-five percent of advertisers already use the system. What Meta does not yet have is a population of synthetic consumers to test those campaigns against before they go live. It does, however, have 79,000 employees whose behavioral data has been tracked by My Claw, indexed by Second Brain, and scored across 200-plus data points by an internal performance tracker called Checkpoint, which monitors everything from how much AI-generated code each engineer writes to how much they write without AI, presumably so the next layoff can be alphabetized by usefulness.
Starting this year, AI-driven impact is a core metric in every employee’s performance review. Top performers receive a 200% bonus multiplier. A new “Meta Award” offers 300%. The company did not disclose what employees who decline to feed the machine receive, but the historical answer at Meta has been a cardboard box and a boot in the ass out the door.
Zuckerberg has a history with digital self-replication. In 2022, he shared a metaverse avatar that was publicly compared to a Wii character from 2006, prompting him to post an upgraded version that was publicly compared to a Wii character from 2008. Meta has since scaled back the metaverse in favor of AI, which is like pivoting from the fire to the frying pan, except the frying pan costs $135 billion a year and has hallucinations about how much glue you should eat for lunch.
Last week, the company launched Muse Spark, its first model under the new Superintelligence Labs, which can estimate the calories in your meal from a photo but trails competing models in coding and abstract reasoning. It’s a system that knows what you’re eating but not why, which is also a reasonable description of Meta’s advertising infrastructure in general.
A jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million in March for enabling child sexual exploitation on its platforms. A court in California found that Instagram was deliberately made addictive. Zuckerberg’s AI clone has not yet been asked about either ruling, though it has been trained on his public statements, so it will presumably express deep concern, apologize, do nothing about it, then get caught doing it again.
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