# AI Cloning, IP Risks, and Creator Monetization

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-03-24

## Transcript

Hi folks, this is All Things Product with Petra Ville.
And Teresa Torres.
And we're so happy you're here.
Hey Petra, I heard you said something that I know you didn't say.
Let's get into this whole topic around people using AI to pretend like they're talking to us.
What do you think about this?
I think it happened to both of us multiple times now that people have been cloning us.
If the people that are just listening, I did this finger movement and say, like they're cloning air quotes.
They're not really cloning us.
But based on podcast transcripts that have been published, on uh talks that we gave.
So people continue to play with that data and build whatever chatbots based on it.
Um that they then ask for advice, which has the headline, what would Petra say, or what would Teresa say?
And I tried several of these projects.
First of all, it's always it always feels a bit cringe, or I have to admit, I feel abused sometimes.
It really creates this notion of somebody has taken some of the information that I put out there in public without my consent, put it out of context, and is building a product based on it.
So that already creates a bit of a yeah, really like an abused kind of feeling.
Um, bitter aftertaste at least.
And then the tools are oftentimes so poorly designed.
That's a totally other topic that we could double tap in.
Why are people using AI for the all the wrong all the wrong things basically?
Um quality is not good.
So the most basic things that one would do when designing such a tool obviously has not been done.
And as I tried them, they always give out bad advice.
So they're not giving the advice that is even close to what I advise people, would advise people to do.
Yeah, and it just always leaves me puzzled and confused, and yeah, it's to some extent the times we live in.
To some extent, I love the idea that people are playing with data and create out in the open and put stuff out there and allow others to test it.
But then on the other hand, yeah, it really has this bitter aftertaste.
What about you?
Do you like them?
Have you have you seen one of you that comes close to what you would tell people to do?
Yeah, this is a hard topic.
I so my first experience with this was the company Delphi.
They make if people are familiar with Lenny's bot, Lenny's bot is built on the Delphi platform.
And because they partnered with Lenny, they offered a bot to everybody who had been a guest on Lenny's podcast.
And so there's a Teresa bot on the Delphi platform.
I never released it to the public.
And it's because there's a big difference between Lennybot and TeresaBot.
Lennybot doesn't tell you what Lenny thinks.
Lennybot tells you what people on Lenny's podcast have said in the past.
It's like an amalgamation of a whole bunch of people's thoughts.
So it's not like when you use it, you think Lenny says.
You can literally call TeresaBot.
It uses my voice.
So even voice clones.
It sounds like it's me.
It's not me.
It's not me.
It's not giving the answers that I would give.
I didn't know about the voice cloning.
Yeah, and I never used it publicly because I it's different.
Like it's it people treat it like they're asking me questions, and it's not what I would answer.
And then a lot of people do this with like interview synthesis.
They'll put into chat GPT, act like you're Teresa and synthesize this interview for me.
And they think it's amazing, but that is not how I would synthesize your interview.
And what's hard about this, I love that people are trying and like obviously rewrite content to try to teach and share these ideas.
Yeah, I know.
But I think what's hard about this is when you don't develop expertise in these areas, you can't tell that it's not good.
Yeah.
And that's one of the other episodes.
Yeah, we already didn't know.
And then all these like mediocre, all these mediocre responses get attributed to our brand.
And that's that's a one, I hate that.
Like, I don't want mediocre anything associated with my brand.
And then there's this competitive concern of like I'm building some of these tools, and like but I have to create ways for you to try my tools for free so that you can see the difference.
But it's not free for me to offer these tools to you.
So now it's costing me money to try to differentiate from fake Teresa, which all of this is absurd.
Yeah, all of this, and there is a timely component as well, because I don't even recall when I was on Lenny's podcast.
It might have been two years ago or two and a half years ago.
So even if the tool will be good to pull out core ideas from the interview and the transcript, and not even that is given, by the way, for most of the tools that I saw and tried.
Um still the advice that I have given two and a half years ago, maybe not the advice, or most likely not the advice that I would be giving today.
And then all our all my coaching advice, I usually try to avoid giving too much advice in coaching.
I really focus on the person's problem and that they gain clarity around their problem and basically try solve the problems on themselves.
So I I I try to only give advice every once in a while when it really provides a shortcut to them.
Um but then still there is so more much context that I need to know to understand what type of advice I would give to this person in the given situation.
Um no AI tool has that much content yet.
Not even I succeed in building PetraBot with all the data that I have sitting on my hard drives, right?
Because it requires so much context engineering, and I don't have the time to do so much context engineering right now.
And you would even have to have a much better input structured.
The prompts would need to be structured in a certain way, if I put that out there.
So yeah, and now random people build random tools based on random pub podcast episodes from two and a half years ago.
It's wild.
I think even if I think here's the challenge: even if you did do all that work and you put something out there, you're competing with fake Petra.
Yeah, I know.
People can still just go to Chat GPT and say act like Petra.
And so, like, I'm not gonna do that.
I'm not gonna spend the time to build that because I know I can't sell it.
And it costs inference costs, so it's gonna cost me money to run it.
And like people won't pay for it.
I know they won't pay for it because they can go get it for free or on their $20 chat GPT subscription.
They don't get it for free, they think they get it for free.
Yeah, and so what's hard about this is like I do want to encourage people to use these tools and to like experiment and to try things and to learn, but it creates this tension.
So if there's writers that you admire, if there's creators that are creating helpful content, if you can just go to chat GPT and have chat GPT tell you those people's ideas and act like those people, how do those people make a living?
Yeah, I don't know.
And I don't know that we have an I don't know that we have an answer to this.
Um, but I think it's gonna get a lot worse before it gets a lot better.
And so I think maybe the answer is people need to understand this, like consumers need to understand that, like, yeah, maybe it's okay to go try and say it synthesize this interview like Teresa, but also find a way to support Teresa, yeah, right?
Like there's not be amazing, otherwise, there's not gonna be more content from Twitter.
Yeah, then at some point we could stop to think about things, and that's so you're not only paying for our content, what you paying us for is basically that we constantly learn and evolve and reflect and think a lot of think a lot of things through that you maybe don't have the time for.
We have bigger context, usually more people that we talk to.
Um, and that's another thing that people usually are paying us for.
The content is only kind of um yeah, the user interface through which the people interact with what we've done there.
So yeah, I don't know.
Hopefully, there will be, yeah, hopefully there will be monetization ideas as well at some point.
I don't want this to just be like a whiny session of like pay Teresa and Petra for things.
I think like the reality is almost everybody, people do this.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think the reality is is that like a lot of products are facing this, like a lot of little tools.
Why would I buy your tool?
I can build it myself in two seconds.
I think part of this is just the nature of change in a changing landscape.
I think I really love it when people experiment and they try things and they push the boundaries of what's possible with LLMs.
And I really I have so much free content, and if you want to stick that free content into an LLM, that's amazing.
I think what crosses the line for me, when you do that, it's not me.
It's not the same quality you're gonna get from me.
You gotta be aware of that.
Yeah.
I think when you take my book and you put my book into an LLM because you found a pirated PDF.
Now you're crossing an IP line.
I don't like it when you do that.
My book is ten dollars.
You can spend ten dollars on the book.
Um I think also like there's we have to find a way to show, and I like maybe this is on us, but we have to find a way to show that like average inputs into an LLM get you average outputs.
And that's not the same as what you get from humans, and it's not the same as what you get from expert crafted AI tools.
Yeah, exactly.
And then on top of it, I think common sense should still apply.
So before people are creating any of those tools, think about if it's morally and ethically fine to do so.
Because for example, on Instagram right now, there are so many videos of dead people basically giving interviews or giving a talk or a speech or something like that.
And I I find it super cringe.
It's not okay to clone Marilyn Monroe and let her do whatever.
Just don't do these things, and not it's technically possible, but as it has been the last one million years, just because it's technically possible, it's still not okay to do it.
So maybe we can apply a bit more common sense again.
I think that last piece makes me think about this from another angle, and I think that it's a little bit dehumanizing, right?
Like I feel this way sometimes when I go to conferences, like a lot of people, you can probably get this too.
Like they talk to you, but they're not talking to you.
They've put you on a pedestal.
Yeah.
They're awkward.
They don't they don't see you as a person.
They see you as an author.
They see you as a speaker.
To me, it's very weird.
Like, I just want to be a person and we're interacting.
There's a little bit of this.
Both you and I spend a lot of effort in that people know that usually, that we are approachable.
Yeah, that we have a sense of humor, that we are human beings.
Yeah.
And I I think that like maybe when people put this stuff into LLMs, it exacerbates that.
This is Teresa's not a person, she's a collection of ideas.
Petra is not a person, she's a collection of ideas.
And I want to unlock that skill in Chat GPT.
Yeah.
And I I guess I would just want to encourage people, whether it's our work or anybody's work or your Marilyn Monroe example, like remember there's real people behind this.
Yeah.
I have been in Marilyn's case.
Yeah.
And I don't I don't want people to hear it, hear this and say, like, oh, I can't ask ChatGPT to do something from Teresa's perspective.
I actually think it's fine for people to do that.
Just don't equate it as you asked me to do it.
Yeah.
Because it's not the same quality.
That's the difference.
Yeah.
That's why it crosses the line.
And then I also want to share that I think this is an old idea.
So you've probably been in this experience where you spoke at a conference.
They paid you a fee.
You your agreement was I'm gonna come to your event, I'm gonna speak at your conference.
What they didn't tell you was they were gonna record your talk, package it, and sell it as a subscription.
And this has happened to us a number of times.
We're like, that's we didn't agree to that.
You don't get to sell my IP.
And now, like I put in all my speaker agreements, you can't do that.
Or you're gonna pay me more than that.
Extra I have that as well.
You can pay me for that, but it's not a good idea.
And so I think I can rip it off.
I think that we have lots of examples where people, authors, speakers, share their knowledge, and the people, the venue in which they're sharing it, they don't recognize they don't own it.
Like it's literally in our agreements.
You don't own my IP.
Um, and so I think some of this is people just don't think about it from that person's point of view.
And they're just they think about it as like we curated this conference.
This is my content.
I'm gonna turn around and sell it.
Yeah, and Lenny published all his transcripts.
So what's the point, Teresa?
He published all of them.
So why should I not build something upon it?
So let's what inspired this conversation is that Lenny recently open sourced all of his podcast transcripts.
In a lot of ways, I think this is very admirable and just contributed a lot to the community.
Yeah.
And in other ways, I wish he had asked his guests if they were okay with that.
Um he's not selling them, so it feels a little bit better than this conference example, right?
Um, I would if he had asked me, I would have said yes, just to be clear.
Yeah, I would say that's true.
I most likely would have said yes as well.
Yeah.
Um, but it's a little bit of whose IP is that.
And I can tell you a lot of podcasts have agreements where it's defined in the contract whose IP it was.
And um, I don't go on a podcast where they say they own my IP of what I'm sharing on the podcast.
Yeah.
Right.
So I don't, we don't have that equivalent with LLMs.
Like I have no control over what you put in an LLM.
I can't even keep you from putting my book in an LLM.
Um so it's hard.
Like I don't know, I don't know what the answers are.
I definitely don't.
I mean, my long-term goal is literally to open source everything I've ever done in my work.
Like before I die, I will make everything I offer, if I ever created in the world free.
Like I'm a big fan of free.
But at the same time, I have to make a living.
Yeah.
Right?
And so do you.
At least for the time being.
Yeah.
So there's this like weird phase we're in where we have new tools that allow people to just take people's IP, and they seem to think it's okay.
And I don't know.
I I maybe I'll just my last thought on this will be if there's people's work that is influencing you, make sure you find a way to support those people.
In whatever form that is.
That's great.
Last and final words for this episode.
Thank you, Teresa.
Thanks, Petra.
Hopefully, people don't think we just ranted, but it was a demo movement.
The angry old ladies.
Why not?
Every once in a while.