July 2025. Marbella. 37 degrees. Me, in my underwear at 2 AM in front of the computer, trying to teach an artificial intelligence to talk like me.

If someone had described this scene to me two years ago, I would have thought it was the plot of a bad Netflix movie. But no. It was my life. And it was a course assignment.

The Assignment

Topic 5 of the DOMINA ChatGPT course was called “Create Your Digital Mini-Me”. The idea was simple: train ChatGPT to learn your writing style, your tone, your way of thinking. Make it stop talking like a polite robot and start talking like you.

Simple, right?

No.

Because to teach an AI to talk like you, you first need to know how you talk. And discovering how you talk at 71, after 42 years selling trips, is like opening the junk drawer: everything comes out.

The Poetic Proposal

The first thing I did was dig through my files for an old text to give ChatGPT as a sample of my style. I found a travel proposal that I myself described as “one of my most poetic and ancient ones.” It was a long, emotional, passionate text, full of sensory imagery.

It was also a disaster.

No structure. No hierarchy. No call to action. It was as if someone had put a travel brochure, a Neruda poem, and a sales email into a blender and hit “pulse.”

But it was MINE. It was my voice. My way of selling. The way I tell a client that the Dolomites aren’t just mountains — they’re an experience that changes you.

I fed it to ChatGPT. “Here. Learn from this.”

The Clone Speaks

What happened next was unsettling.

ChatGPT analyzed my text, identified my tone (“professional-adventurous,” it called it), my rhythms, my quirks. And it gave me back an improved version that kept my essence but with a structure that — and it pains me to admit this — was objectively better than mine.

Organized. Clear. With subheadings. With a call to action. With a web version, a Facebook version, and even hashtags.

My digital mini-me had taken my 42 years of experience, run them through a clarity filter, and handed them back gift-wrapped.

Jose Rodenas, the instructor, wrote:

“You’ve built a more effective version of yourself, without losing your essence.” [Originally in Spanish]

Which is the elegant way of saying: “Your clone writes better than you, but at least it still sounds like you."

"Voy a mimártela”

The second part of the exercise was creating a style guide for the mini-me. Defining how Giora talks. What expressions he uses. What tone he has in an email versus a WhatsApp message.

And this is where things got fun. Because it turns out I have “natural turns of phrase” that even I didn’t know I had.

“Voy a mimártela.” (Roughly: “I’m going to pamper you rotten.”) That’s what I tell clients when I’m preparing something special for them. I don’t know when I started saying it. But I say it. And now it’s written into the DNA of my digital clone.

“Esto no va de esquiar. Va de vivir la montaña.” (“This isn’t about skiing. It’s about living the mountain.”) My line for when a client asks why they should go to the Dolomites instead of the local ski hill. It’s not that the local hill is bad. It’s that the Dolomites are something else entirely. And you need exactly the right words to say that.

Jose highlighted these phrases as “turns that add color and authenticity.” I call them “things I say without thinking after 42 years.” But Jose’s version sounds better.

The 2 AM Confession

In my exercise reflection, I wrote something that, reading it now, makes me feel both a little embarrassed and a little proud:

“The AI improvements have me hooked, working every day without knowing the time, I barely sleep :-)”

And then, in case it wasn’t clear:

“I can’t stop doing it every hour, every minute and every second of every day for the last 60 days.”

Sixty days. Non-stop. At 71 years old. In Marbella. In summer.

My terrace friends were lifting beers at 11 PM. I was at home teaching an AI to write “Voy a mimártela” with the right tone.

Jose responded diplomatically: “Your energy… people half your age would envy it.” [Originally in Spanish] Which was probably his way of saying: “Giora, please sleep.”

What I Learned by Cloning Myself

Creating a digital mini-me taught me three things:

First: I know more than I think. 42 years selling trips gave me a style, a tone, a way of connecting with people that I couldn’t even articulate myself. It took an AI to tell me what I already knew.

Second: My improved version is still me. The clone doesn’t replace me. It amplifies me. It’s like those hotel bathroom mirrors with the magnifying side: you’re still you, but you see details you couldn’t see before.

Third: Not sleeping at 71 because you’re playing with technology is medically questionable but existentially priceless.

The Sextet

What I didn’t know then was that this mini-me was just the beginning. A few weeks later, in another exercise, I built six specialized GPTs — the “Ideal Sextet of Viajes Scibasku” — each trained for a different function of my agency: ski sales, diving sales, customer service, web content, market analysis, and strategy.

Six versions of me. Each expert in their domain. All with my tone. All saying “Voy a mimártela” when the moment calls for it.

Jose didn’t know what to write in his corrections anymore. The poor man would grade normal students’ exercises and then mine would arrive: an army of digital clones at 3 in the morning.

What AI Courses Don’t Tell You

AI courses teach you prompts, techniques, tools. What they don’t tell you is the exact moment when your digital clone writes something and you think: “Damn, that’s exactly what I would have said. But better.”

That moment is strange. It’s a bit like seeing yourself on video and thinking you look good — it shouldn’t happen, but when it does, it changes something inside you.

It changed how I work. Because if my clone can write the first draft of a proposal in 3 minutes while keeping my tone, I can devote those 42 years of experience to what really matters: knowing that Chez Vrony has the best rosti in Zermatt, that the second run of the Northern Explorer in Niseko departs at 8:45, and that Mrs. Garcia likes the room with the sea view but NOT on the ground floor because it gives her the creeps.

No clone knows that. I know that.

And that’s why the clone works for me, and not the other way around.

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If you want to see the exercises that started this madness, they’re all here — with Jose’s notes included.

See my 22 course exercises

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Giora Gilead · CICMA 2283 · Marbella · Pedalling since 1954