Arguing with a Disinformer: ERIS at European Researchers’ Night 2026
An AI tried its manipulation tricks on visitors, then revealed how it had done it and what it had guessed about them.
Copies of the Mind? Jan Kleiner on Synthetic Human Twins
Can artificial intelligence make a working copy of a person? At a public lecture at the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University on September 29, Jan Kleiner explained how synthetic human twins are built and where simulation ends and the question of the human mind begins.
On September 29, CENTREPEACE held a public lecture at the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University. Its title was itself a question: Kopie mysli? (Copies of the Mind?). Jan Kleiner, an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and a member of CENTREPEACE’s Cognitive Warfare Team, looked at how artificial intelligence is used to create synthetic twins of real people.
The lecture began with generative agents, AI systems that don’t just answer prompts but act consistently in a given role, and with how they are turned into a double of a specific person. Kleiner then moved to the less obvious step: how identity, memory, and behavior are translated into a form a machine can store and act on. We usually think of these as private and hard to pin down.
The final part turned to what current technology can actually do. A synthetic twin can imitate how a person writes, answers, or makes choices. Whether that imitation amounts to a copy of their mind is a different question, and it’s the one the lecture’s title posed.
For the Cognitive Warfare Team, the topic is not only philosophical. A convincing digital copy of a person is a research tool, but it can just as easily become a tool of deception.
