Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
Gemini turned a WIRED editor into three style guides and a bot he tried to cancel
A WIRED reporter built persona bots of her two editors inside Gemini. The dossier surfaced a true fact about her manager's improv training, and the bot that came with it answered her like a press release.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- A WIRED reporter covering the future of work built AI clones of her two editors, Brian Barrett and Sophie Kleeman, using Gemini because it is Conde Nast's AI platform of choice.
- Gemini Notebook produced a Writing and Editing Style Guide, a Persona and Style Guide and an Editorial Dossier for her manager, assembled largely from his public digital footprint.
- The bot caught a few of Barrett's habits, including his fondness for parentheticals, then padded its answers with bolded subheadings and bulleted lists the reporter found grating.
- A Big Tech employee using the pseudonym Chip told WIRED he feeds every email, chat and document his boss sends him into the same Gem feature and uses the result to rehearse for pushback.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint A persona built from public footprint inherits whatever the web has confused, and catching an identity collision requires already knowing the colleague well, which is the knowledge the tool was supposed to supply.
- decision Teams piloting these assistants have to choose a corpus before they choose a use case: the colleague's own emails and documents, or biographical material written about them.
- capability Rehearsing a named reviewer's likely objections before a meeting is the one job in the account that someone reports getting value from, and it does not need the bot to imitate anyone's voice.
- exposure The colleague being cloned becomes the training data and has little recourse once the dossier exists; Barrett consented and then asked for the bot to be shut off.
The two setups in WIRED's account differ in what went into them. Brian Bot was assembled from material written about Brian Barrett: new-hire announcements, podcast transcripts, a public relations page [5]. The Gem that Chip runs was assembled from material written by his boss, every email, chat and document the boss has sent him [15].
That matters because one of the three kinds of public source Gemini offered was about the wrong man. A PR page calling Barrett an expert on New England weather described a different Brian Barrett, and the reporter cut it from the Brian Bot blueprint once she found out [6][1]. She had been covering the future of work at WIRED for a few months when she started [1]. The person a persona bot is sold to help is the newcomer. The newcomer is the one least equipped to spot the wrong Barrett.
The dossier did retrieve something real. Gemini flagged a key theme it called Barrett's "'Yes, and ...' Leadership Style," and wrote that "His extensive background with the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) theatre in New York strongly shapes his collaborative, active-listening leadership approach" [10]. It was true, and Barrett had never mentioned improv to her [11]. Then the bot reused it. Asked its favorite thing about WIRED, Brian Bot said "We run like a well-oiled improv team," and added that "We validate bold ideas, pivot rapidly, and deploy modular stories across platforms without losing structural rigor" [13]. "Pulling the plug on Brian Bot," the real Barrett said. "Brian Bot canceled" [12]. He had agreed to the experiment the day before, over Slack: "Genuinely my nightmare," he told her. "But will do it for the blog" [3].
On the editorial work, the reporter found the bot passable at helping her pick headlines to pitch and not great at coming up with ideas for future articles [8]. It caught a few Brian-isms, a love for parentheticals among them, then buried them under bolded subheadings and bulleted lists [9]. She wrote that "talking to Brian Bot was nothing like talking to actual Brian, which defeated its whole purpose" [14]. WIRED reports her impressions of output quality and not how long she kept using either bot.
Chip's version does a narrower job. His Gem proofreads documents, debugs code and brainstorms with him before every meeting, so he can prepare for pushback from his actual boss [16]. Chip told WIRED he is "much more efficient" with it, which is his own account and is not measured [17]. The Gem never has to sound like the boss, only guess what he will object to.
So two things to settle before anyone pilots this on a team. The first is who wrote the corpus, the colleague or the internet about the colleague. The second is what the output is for, rehearsing against a human who will review it, or drafting something that ships. Four boxes come out of that, and in WIRED's account only one has a working example in it: documents the boss wrote, used to anticipate objections before a meeting [15][16]. The box the press releases are pitched into, a persona assembled from public footprint, is the one that produced three style guides and a cancellation notice inside 24 hours [7][4].
What to watch
- Whether Gemini's Gem gains any way to weight documents a colleague wrote above documents written about them.
- Whether Chip's claimed efficiency gain ever gets measured, since WIRED reports it only as his own account.
- Whether employers set rules on building persona bots of named colleagues, and on whether the colleague has to agree.