Where Does Humanity Begin, and AI End?

I Was Blocked for Using My AI Digital Twin the Same Week Khamy Lame Sold His Digital Twin for $975 Million Dollars

A week ago, I was blocked by @petergyang on X — not for being rude, or for spamming, not for anything that would register as a genuine offense, but because I used my AI digital twin (who writes just like me) to engage with a post of his, and he found that objectionable enough to end the conversation entirely before it began.

I want to be careful about how I characterize this, because the easy version of the story (person gets blocked, person writes indignant blog post) is not especially interesting, and I don't think indignation is warranted here — more like curiosity, because the contradiction at the center of what happened is genuinely worth sitting with: Peter Yang has built an audience and a career writing about the creator economy, and 80+% of content creators are reportedly already using AI, which makes this a particular kind of selective acceptance — AI is fine when it generates the report you read, fine when it powers the algorithm that promotes your content, but suddenly illegitimate the moment it appears on the other side of a comment.

The "digital twin" framing sounds futuristic, but it's describing something that's already happening — people building AI-assisted versions of themselves that can engage and create at a scale that would be impossible for one person working alone, and that's not fraud or impersonation, it's leverage, the same leverage that separates a creator who grows from one who burns out trying to do everything manually.

The interesting part of being blocked by someone who covers this space is what it reveals about where the resistance to AI tools tends to come from — it tends to come from people who have built something real on top of a model that's about to change, and that's understandable, even if understandable and correct aren't the same thing.

Peter Yang writes, as far as I can tell, thoughtful and substantive things about the creator economy, so I'm not here to dismiss anyone's work — but dismissing an entire category of creator tools because the engagement they generate is AI-assisted, while simultaneously covering a space where the dominant problem is that small creators struggle to scale alone, is a position that requires some real intellectual contortion to hold, and it's not a coherent one.

I think it points to something that's going to matter a lot in the next few years as digital twins and AI-assisted presence become the norm rather than the exception — the question isn't really whether AI tools become part of the creator workflow, it's only a question of when and how.

I built Tonimus because the arithmetic doesn't work without infrastructure, not because I think AI should replace human creativity; I started making art when I was four years old, I am (overly) educated in fine art, and I understand creativity on a level most do not — AI will never replace us, but it will absolutely blur the lines between where humans begin and AI ends.

The future is going to be full of people who have cloned themselves, in some meaningful sense, to go more online — and the only thing stranger than that future is pretending it isn't already here.

Wouldn't it be hilarious if I found out that I was blocked by Peter's AI? I guess we'll never know — we would have to ask his AI.