How to build an AI of yourself using your reddit history
I hate the way AI talks back to me. Its so proper, so robotic, every response feels like a help article. I wanted something that actually knew who i am, my beliefs, my history, what shaped me, the positions i hold and why. Not a generic assistant that treats every question like it came from nobody. So i got to thinking, who better to talk to than myself? So i built it over a weekend. Heres what I did and how you can do it too. Step 1: Export your Reddit data Go to reddit.com and click your profile icon in the top right, then hit Settings. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and youll see a section called "Data Request." Click "Request Data Export" and Reddit will email you a download link within a few hours, sometimes longer depending on how much history you have. The zip file will contain your posts and comments going back to when you created your account. Mine was about 21,000 comments over two years. Once you have it, open the CSVs in excel or just upload them directly into Claude and ask it to help you make sense of the structure. The raw data is ugly but everything is there, the text of every comment, the subreddit it was posted in, the date, all of it. One thing worth knowing: you can go way deeper than just Reddit. I looked into Google Takeout while i was doing this and it was honestly a little scary how much data they have on you. If you want to go deeper Google Takeout is wild, i didnt realize how much data they actually have on you until i went through it. Search history, location history, YouTube, Gmail, its all there and its all exportable. I thought about pulling my SMS history too but that felt wrong, those conversations are with real people who didnt agree to any of this so i left it alone. Reddit was enough for me and honestly if youve been on here for years and actually say what you think in the comments, you probably have more to work with than you realize. Step 2: Build the personality document and this is where the real work is Dont just tell t