Show HN: I loaded all Paul Grahams essays into an AI Avatar

3 stewlabs 6 7/26/2025, 5:56:21 AM humanconscious.com ↗

Comments (6)

stewlabs · 21h ago
Hey HN - I've been thinking a lot about longevity and human existence recently so I created this site so you could recreate individuals (or yourself) and ask them questions and learn from them.

I'm really not sure what the use cases particularly are, but my thoughts were at some point, users could monetize their Avatars or use them for their businesses.

Paul Graham is easier since he has all his essays public.

Powered by Gemini AI and built on Replit.

Enjoy!

zainbahari · 19h ago
Interesting concept. But it hallucinates a lot. It looks like you need to tighten the screws a little bit. What LLM are you using?
stewlabs · 11h ago
Good to know - its powered by Gemini. I can weight it harder with the training data - good call out.
mindcrime · 20h ago
Seems to be the trendy thing to do these days:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44431943

It's cool I guess. I'd be a hypocrite I guess, to suggest otherwise given that I also did a "pgbot" thing[1] a long time ago.

But somehow these newer things feel different. I think what I did was very obviously a joke, especially since it only had like 7 responses it could generate. But even then I felt a little iffy about publishing the code, and I always figured if pg contacted me and said "take this shit down" I'd do so immediately. And I never instantiated it as a running service, so anybody who wanted to play with it had to deal with setting it up to run somewhere (something I doubt anyone has ever done).

Something like this though, that's based on his entire corpus of essays and can make a semi-plausible attempt to replicate him as a publicly available service? I dunno. I guess I wonder if it's not in bad taste to do this with a living person without asking for permission? Or maybe you did and this is all a moot point.

[1]: https://github.com/mindcrime/pgbot

stewlabs · 11h ago
Interesting - yea not sure if there is a use case just yet. We also did it with Warren Buffett shareholder letters etc. I think there might be use cases for folks who have large audiences and want to be able to reply to everyone without a full overseas chatting team.
stewlabs · 21h ago
Turns out everyone just wants to ask him sexual questions...