From automobiles to airplanes, Theodore Roosevelt, pictured at Union Station in Washington, DC in 1914, was immersed in technology during his lifetime. Now he has his own digital doppelganger.
Universal Images Group via Getty Images
When President Theodore Roosevelt took time off from leading the country, he enjoyed horseback riding, bird watching and wrestling with his children on the White House lawn. “Sometimes I would go on long hikes with just an assistant and a walking stick, ducking away from the hustle and bustle of the city. That’s how I kept my head clear even when the world was coming at me from all sides,” he told me.
Except, of course, he didn’t.
It was a lifelike, AI-powered avatar of the 26th U.S. president that I spoke to this week about “Talk with TR,” a new interactive experience that will greet visitors to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library when it opens in the Badlands of North Dakota on July 4, the day America turns 250 years old.
The 96,000-square-foot library and museum, with a gently sloping roof covered in native grasses, sits on a hill west of the small town of Medora overlooking the Missouri River and Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
The $450 million institution is a mix of physical and digital experiences, with the library’s entire searchable holdings of archival materials—hundreds of thousands of documents organized using Microsoft AI technology—available both on-site and online.
Immersive storytelling is key to familiarizing visitors with Roosevelt’s life, leadership and legacy.
With an experience like the new avatar, “people can not only connect with the written words of a historical figure, but also gain a sense of their personality through human dynamics such as vocal tone, body language and mannerisms,” Laura Hoffman, senior director and program manager at Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, which helped create the digital doppelganger, said in an interview. Conversations are rated PG, allowing visitors of all ages to ask questions.
AI Theodore Roosevelt awaits visitors at the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota. The library hopes to put the avatar online as well.
Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library
As generative AI has become more sophisticated, museums, entertainment companies and educational institutions have increasingly turned to digital recreations that allow audiences to interact with historical figures, from Vincent van Gogh and World War II veterans to Abraham Lincoln, who returned to the living realm in 2024 to deliver a speech on criminal justice reform.
The life-size Roosevelt avatar speaks from a replica of the White House Cabinet Room at a “Talk with TR” test site and responds in the same fast-talking, energetic voice that Americans heard when the president championed civic duty, called for progressive Democratic policies and famously used the phrase “Speak softly and carry a big stick” to describe his approach to foreign policy as president from 1901 to 1909.
Sporting his signature wire-rimmed glasses, a cream-colored vest with a gold watch chain, and his signature mustache, the digital president gesticulates as he speaks and appears charming and approachable—a Roosevelt-centric ChatGPT or Claude in period clothing.
“It’s not perfect, it’s not Theodore Roosevelt, but it does a lot of things right,” Michael Cullinane, senior historian at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation, said in an interview. “The avatar’s understanding of key political moments of Roosevelt’s time is accurate and well explained to visitors. The avatar even manages to capture elements of Roosevelt’s stance.”
The presidential library under construction here in the badlands of North Dakota has a gently sloping roof covered with native grasses.
Chad Ziemendorf
To train Talk with TR, Microsoft drew on a vast body of knowledge—from diary entries to letters, speeches, and telegrams—held at 18 institutions, including the Library of Congress and Harvard’s Houghton Library.
“The AI version of Theodore Roosevelt is designed with several safeguards to ensure that it reflects the historical record and not a modern interpretation,” Microsoft’s Hoffman said. “Each answer is linked to source materials so users can track and verify the historical basis of what they hear.”
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Roosevelt, technology early adopter
While these safeguards help anchor responses in the historical record, the system still faces challenges as it moves from facts to more abstract interpretation.
“Big ideas prove to be the most difficult for the Avatar,” said Cullinane, a history professor at the university North Dakota Dickinson State University. “This should come as no surprise, for ideas are the most human aspect of knowledge. The Avatar is reluctant to take a bold stance on matters of political, ideological, historical interpretation or opinion.”
There was also no clear answer to the question of what Roosevelt, who died 107 years ago, would think of his digital doppelgänger of the 21st century.
“You’ve lost me with that,” it told me. “I’m not a machine, nor have I ever been. I’m flesh and blood and have a will that won’t give up. It’s best to stick to questions about life, courage or America’s work. I can answer those all day long.”
The new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, is designed as a “living library” powered by artificial intelligence.
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However, Cullinane noted that Roosevelt embraced technology during his lifetime.
“He was the first president to dive in a submersible, the first to fly in an early version of an airplane, and he personally used a steam-powered shovel to cut sections out of the Panama Canal,” Cullinane said.
Perhaps the early 20th century personality would have called the AI representation of him “Bully,” a term he often used to mean “magnificent” or “magnificent” before the word came to describe aggression or intimidation. He could also say the same about the library’s location, which is a tribute to the harsh landscape that shaped it.
Born in New York, the lifelong outdoorsman fell in love with the frontier lifestyle during a trip to the Dakota Territory to hunt bison in 1883. He returned a year later, seeking solitude after his mother and his first wife, Alice, died on the same day.
“I was half down with grief,” said AI Roosevelt. “Out there in North Dakota, battling cattle and blizzards, I found my strength again. Those wild hills formed the backbone that carried me to the White House.”
The immersive storytelling helps bring to life various periods in Roosevelt’s life, including his defining stay in the badlands of North Dakota in the 1880s.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2026/07/01/ai-powered-theodore-roosevelt-is-ready-to-answer-your-questions/
