Why
Getting an AI ‘Selfie’ Is the Smartest Move You Can Make Right Now (Before
Everyone Else Does)
Mark Zuckerberg said ‘Nothing is the
future forever.’ This new tech trend is proving him right.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V
AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN
Jun 1, 2026
Those of us who remember
the 70s may recall the famous quote from Jon Landau that appeared in
Boston’s The Real Paper about Bruce Springsteen. In May of
1974, after watching a show where Bruce opened for Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard
Square Theater, Landau wrote “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce
Springsteen.” Apart from his grammar, which left a bit to be desired, he was—as
we used to say back then—“Right on.” Jon jumped right on the Bruce train and a
couple of years thereafter became his lifelong manager. Right place, right
time.
I realize that our
culture today is overly obsessed with the constant search for the next new
thing and that, as Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta (formerly
Facebook), is fond of saying, nothing is the future forever. But there are in
fact moments when you do see and feel something that makes you wonder if, in
fact, the Earth hadn’t just moved for a moment and in that instant changed the
future forever. It seems to me that we might just be on the cusp of seeing the
next new thing and that nobody who’s anybody is going to want to miss the
chance to get in on the ground floor while the gettin’ s still good. FOMO is a
very powerful force, and no one wants to miss the moment or be left behind.
Plus, if you don’t get yours while it’s available, it may soon be gone.
Of course, timing is
everything, and the conditions and the context have to be just right to trigger
a substantial shift in the way that the world does things. Sad to say, for all
of Zuck’s grand schemes and dreams, Meta is very old news for the kids and, as
Yogi Berra once said: “the place is so busy that no one goes there anymore.”
Snap might be a resurrected distant second and X is always going to be a cross
between a toilet and a sewer where it’s all about enragement rather than
engagement. All the other players aren’t even also-rans, they’re “whatever
became of” has beens.
For the next couple of
generations, the only social channels that matter are Instagram, Tik-Tok and
maybe YouTube. These are the most powerful communication tools that we have
today for our youth, but—given the enormous volume of activity and the number of
participants—they’re largely overwhelming, even for the most active posters
and, as a result, they’re rapidly becoming a second day job that no one wants.
The truth is that even
the most dedicated and well-intentioned creators on any of these platforms
couldn’t possibly read, much less personally respond to, the zillions of posts
that they receive constantly. The bad news is that, increasingly, even the most
ardent fans are starting to notice. Fans are fickle and flighty and loyalty
today only means that they haven’t seen anything better yet. Every
entrepreneur’s job is exactly the same—find the next wave, race to the front,
ride it for all it’s worth, and then move on before the inevitable crash.
Perhaps more important
is the fact that these days, the true qualitative metrics of value and
longevity aren’t about gross numbers, fans, followers or traffic volume.
They’re about the artist’s ability to create and manage authentic and
intentional sharing that drives caring and connection. As I wrote recently, the
smart players want to own their own platforms and their content, connect and
transact directly with their fans, ditch the gatekeepers, and cut out all the
other layers and intermediaries that get in the way of direct and “personal”
communication. For sure, this desire is based in no small part on economics, but it’s also about emotion.
Our early social
technologies helped to manufacture thinly-related “friends” and the artificial
impression of intimacy, but any real communicator, performer or other talent
would tell you that mass means nothing and that meaning means everything.
They’d all rather have a smaller collection of real and sincere fans than
millions of nobodies that they’ll never meet. Those are the kinds of
relationships that are still manageable and which pay off in multiple ways. And
they provide demonstrable psychic benefits to the performers and help avoid
burning out.
It turns out that an
essential part of any artist’s preserving their own talent and humanity is
their feeling and ability to believe and demonstrate that they’re not simply
talented robots on the stage replicating the same performances night after
night, albeit all over the world, but instead that they’re caring and committed
professionals with the time, talent and artistry to do and share what they love
doing. The last thing they want is to be chained to a desk or a phone feeding
the social media beast all day long instead of doing what they wanted to do all
along. It could be singing, dancing, teaching, or painting, but, for sure, they
didn’t sign up to be posting all day.
So, the challenge for
all these artists and performers is how do you create and deliver these kinds
of experiences and connections at scale. The fact is that we’re all stretched
and pulled in many directions all day long and, in addition to being weary and
close to shutting down, if an artist is honest with himself or herself, they’re
likely to acknowledge that sometimes they feel that they’re doing a halfway job
and not delivering what was promised to their fans and followers. It’s far too
easy to get spread a mile wide and an inch deep and disappoint everyone
including yourself.
That’s why I think that,
for anyone with an active and expanding social audience, getting yourself
a Selfie—a digital
twin that you can build in minutes—is the smartest thing you can do right now.
I think of this as an investment in the future rather than in the present, and
if you don’t start taking steps to invest in the future, it’s highly likely
that you won’t have one.
And honestly, since we
haven’t figured out how to physically clone ourselves, it’s pretty clear to me
that soon everyone will have a personal digital twin like Selfie to write,
post, comment and respond for them automatically and on a 24/7 basis in a manner
that accurately reflects their intelligence, use of language and slang, writing
style and conversational phrasing. I’m not talking about some business bot or
shopping widget—that’s boring, already overdone, and mostly disappointing.
I’m talking about a
highly personal and social online twin (what better name for it than Selfie)
that—solely on demand—automatically ingests all your social feeds, all your
photos and videos, and anything and everything else that you supply it and
builds a “brain” that thinks like you, writes like you, reflects your typical
style and tone, and can answer questions from your fans, followers, family,
friends or anyone else based on everything that it knows about you and on
nothing else. No hallucinations, no out-to-lunch responses, and polite enough
to say from time to time that it simply doesn’t know.
You are always totally
in control of your Selfie and can edit anything it writes, improve or add to
its suggestions and responses, and/or decide to simply trash any post or
comment or answer that it makes for you. Your Selfie gets smarter all the time
based on your actions and also by virtue of additional information and material
that you add to its content base over time. Plus, it regularly polls all your
authorized social feeds and adds all your activity in those channels into its
knowledge base as well.
Bottom line: nothing in
our lives is a scarcer resource than our time. Agents are already all over the
business world, for better or worse, but the Selfie is the first substantial
attempt to create a personal agent/digital twin that fully and fairly represents
you in social interactions at scale without taking more than five minutes to
launch a Selfie and without spending more than an hour or two adding content to
really make it your own. It’s easy to predict what the future will eventually
look like; it’s just hard to determine when it will be here. But the Selfie is
here—up and running today—and just waiting for you to get yours before someone
else does.
