Elon Musk has questioned reality after speaking with a man with a voice that sounds “exactly like him”.
The tech billionaire took part in a Spaces event on X, the company formerly known as Twitter than he purchased last year.
Also taking part in the discussion was Adrian Dittmann, whose voice and laugh sounds remarkably similar to Mr Musk’s.
“That was next-level,” Mr Musk posted on X following the encounter.
During the eight minute interaction, the X owner frequently questioned whether Mr Dittmann was a real person or an artificial intelligence voice clone.
“My mind is literally melting out from my ears right now,” Mr Dittmann said.
“This is a fully recursive psy-op, that’s what this is. We are the simulation. I literally put out a tweet saying, ‘hey, we are the matrix, like we make our own things real... I don’t want to break the matrix, I want to reshape it such that it agrees with us’. That’s my mission, personally, I don’t want to break, I want to shape.”
Mr Musk responded: “At some point there’s just going to be like 100 AI clones of me that sound exactly the same.”
Mr Dittmann pushed back by saying he was not an AI, adding: “This is what I unironically sound like all the time. This is natural me.”
Another member of the X Spaces, Borovik.eth, defended Mr Dittmann, posting: “Adrian isn’t really an impersonator. He’s just a guy who sounds exactly like him. I’ve been on a lot of spaces with him over the last few months.”
In an effort to prove that he was human, Mr Dittmann made a chomping noise into his microphone.
“You can hear my meat flaps,” he said, to which Mr Musk burst out laughing.
“I’ve got Elon dying right now, that’s great,” Mr Dittmann said.
Another member of the Spaces event said: “I can’t tell if the real one is talking or...”
Mr Musk questioned Mr Dittmann about his background, though they did not share much in common.
Mr Musk grew up in South Africa before moving to Canada and eventually settling in the United States, whereas his voice doppelganger claimed to have grown up in Gibraltar and Morocco before moving to somewhere in Oceania – he did not reveal where for privacy reasons.
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