If you’re looking for a way to live forever, you’ve come to the right place. Though, it’s not quite what you might think. It’s not a superfood, it’s not a fancy new diet, this… well, this one is a little bit different.

Okay I’ll come clean. It’s not quite living forever. Think of it more like… breaking your essence into billions of tiny little numbers and using those numbers to power an AI model. Sounds a little painful right? Well, as an engineer, I can assure you, the process is completely painless (or so I hope).

This blog post will walk you through the steps I used to train an AI model on all the text messages I’ve sent since I was 12 and give you the code to do the exact same thing. PS, if you’re interested in chatting with my AI clone with all my deepest darkest secrets then you can go to text-ali.com:

Screenshot of text-ali.com

Okay, let’s begin.

The first thing you need to train an AI model is data. Problem is, where can you find all your data?

Well, each iPhone has a small SQLite database called the sms.db. It’s a database that has every SMS/iMessage you’ve ever sent. If your iPhone is jailbroken (not sure if this is even still a thing), it is pretty easy to access. But if you’re like me (a good little boy), then your iPhone is the same encrypted, safe haven Apple wants us to believe it is.

The easiest way to get to the sms.db is to make a backup of your iPhone. When making the backup, the key thing to keep in mind is to not encrypt it by selecting “Don’t encrypt” when prompted.

Once the backup is completed, click on “Manage Backup”, then, click on “Show in Finder”:

In the iPhone backup folder, you have all the data on your iPhone, unencrypted. Once you’re in the backup folder, you need to look for 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28, which is the hashed filename for the sms.db.