Two recent pieces of writing explore the same subject — AI avatars — from different directions, and they are best read as a pair.
The Article: The Many Faces of You: AI Avatars, Digital Memory & the Personhood Economy takes the analytical route — a long examination of what happens when an AI can act as you: investing with your ethics, guarding your accounts, remembering what you forget, and eventually reaching into the physical world with its own body.
The Creative Story: The Mirror Cabinet turns that same material into fiction — five chapters that each dramatise one of the article’s themes: a woman who has outsourced every financial decision, a security avatar turned inside out, a widow and her digitised ghost, a developer meeting his own shadow, and the day every proxy starts trading at once.
Chapter for chapter, the story is the article wearing a narrative face: where the article argues, the story shows. Read the analysis first, then let the fiction make it personal.