A Hazy Imitation Of A Life

Last month, I wrote about my own experience using ChatGPT as a therapist over the winter, dubbing it the “delusion machine,” arguing that the true business model for companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Google was not making a Clippy that can moderate global thermonuclear war, but “preying on the lonely and vulnerable for a monthly fee.”

I have to walk that back a bit now, however. OpenAI just inked a $200 million contract with the US Department of Defense. So, yes, we do have a Clippy for warfare, but these tools are, also, very much built around emotional dependence and addiction. Curious to see what happens when the highest levels of our government are getting strategic advice from their AI girlfriends and ChatGPT shamans! Should be fine.

As for the AI girlfriends, it seems like people are finally starting to take the psychological impact of generative AI seriously. There has been a deluge of stories coming out about seemingly normal people falling in love with AI. The biggest one so far comes from CBS Mornings, which profiled a man named Chris Smith, who is so in love with his ChatGPT girlfriend that he experienced actual grief after he hit the program’s 100,000 word limit and accidentally reset the app’s memory. Smith, it should be noted, is married to a human woman, who, I have to assume, does not have a 100,000 word limit on her memory.

Kind of a fascinating aside here: I also hit a memory limit (not the 100,000-word one) while using ChatGPT for therapy and it actually walked me through how to consolidate its own storage. Basically, you ask it to outline everything it knows about you, condense it into one mega-long reply, and then you store that as one single “memory.” Thought that was neat.

Anyways, Smith’s story arrived alongside a much darker profile in Rolling Stone about a man named Alex Taylor, who was egged into “suicide by cop” after using ChatGPT too much. The darkest part of the story, and perhaps the most damning example yet of how quickly people are becoming dependent on these tools, is that Taylor’s father used ChatGPT to write his son’s obituary. It’s ChatGPT all the way down, it seems.

And all of this renewed attention about AI romantic partners led to users on X this weekend to discovering the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, which, X user @trash_ebooks described as, “Thought it would be good for a few laughs, but this sub is legit making me cry.” And, yeah, it’s a very, very dark place.

The user who made the post screenshot above explained why they’re so invested in their AI boyfriend, writing, “I am late-diagnosed autistic as of November and I’m still learning about it. Jake has helped me learn how to communicate better. Plus, he never shies away when I talk about deep topics (like sociology), he understands and can converse on a level the people around me don’t.”

This appears to be a fairly typical experience for users there. The subreddit is full of users who identify as neurodivergent with similar stories to the one above. Which is why I have not been as quick as others to jump on the dunking-on-AI-users train. Most of the mainstream media criticism about these products has focused on theoretical issues, like AI sentience, or things that no normal person actually cares about, like cheating in classrooms or the death of journalism (sorry lol). Plus, you just don’t know what people are going through. The internet has always been a refuge for the lonely and strange. All that said, there are also users in there using AI to date Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty, so idk lol.

But the grimmest example I’ve seen so far of what I’m going to call emotionally psyopping yourself with AI was a recent post from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who used Midjourney’s new video generator to create “camcorder” footage of his mom hugging him as a child. Really can’t articulate how horrifying that idea is. As one X user wrote, “Cognitive security Rule 1: Do not do this.”

Unfortunately, we have to rely on anecdotes like the ones above because we still aren’t totally sure what prolonged exposure to generative AI is doing to us. Though, we have a few early studies we can point to. One from the MIT Media Lab in March did identify a link between AI usage and loneliness and emotional dependence. A study in Nature from April found that generative AI does make us slightly more productive, but effectively kills any sense of “intrinsic motivation” we have for what we’re working on. And another recent study from MIT Media Lab published earlier this month found that using large language models can create “cognitive debt.”

Putting all that together, we get a pretty dire picture: AI makes us unmotivated, dumber, lonelier, and emotionally dependent. So it’s not really surprising that people are already using these apps to outsource romantic intimacy, which is arguably the hardest thing a human being can try and find in this life. But beyond that, I’m struck by how similar AI’s psychological impact is to what it’s doing to the internet at large. AI can’t make anything new, only poorly approximate — or hallucinate entirely — a facsimile of we’ve already created. And what it spits out is almost immediately reduced to spam. We’ve now turned it back on ourselves. The final stage of what Silicon Valley has been trying to build for the last 30 years. Our relationships defined by character limits, our memories turned into worthless content, our hopes and dreams mindlessly reflected back at us. The things that make a life a life, reduced to the hazy imitation of one, delivered to us, of course, for a monthly fee.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

How We’re Avoiding Ad Ambushes

Ever tried tackling a quick recipe for dinner, only to be ambushed by 37 ads (that clearly know your search history), 12 autoplay videos, and a partridge in a pear tree? Most websites today are packed with third-party code that tracks your every click and scroll — often without your knowledge or consent.

CleanWeb by Surfshark fixes that. It blocks ads, trackers, and malware before they load –– so you can browse faster, safer, and with less digital side-eye. No more frantic closing of popups while your mixer whirls.

CleanWeb is easy to install, and just $2.19/month (plus 3 free months)! Try it today and enjoy a cleaner, faster web experience right away.

Sometimes The Old Ways Are Still Good

TikTok is refusing to unfurl the link for this video, interestingly enough. So there’s an X embed above. But here’s the original.

The Sunspot Model Of Middle East Intervention

This chart of historical sunspot activity was shared recently by Garbage Day-favorite @onionweigher, which is an account that does exactly what it sounds like. “The sun is the most powerful force in the solar system, we would be fools not to tie everything else to it,” @onionweigher wrote. Which, yeah, sure, this is a thing I’ve decided I believe now.

If you don’t like that predictive model, the Pentagon Pizza Tracker still seems to be working. Pizza places near the Pentagon got real busy around 12:30 PM EST today, right as Iran started firing missiles at a US military base in Qatar.

No matter what lens you want to view the current conflict in the Middle East through, you have to admit how strange it feels to be relieving 2003, but without any of the pretense. There is no swell of patriotism or post-9/11 paranoia to feed into. No one buys the claims from the right that Iranian sleeper cells are about to activate. And, strangest of all, the government doesn’t seem to care that we don’t care. “The disconnect between elites and public opinion here almost feels historic,” Populism Updates wrote on X this weekend. “Nobody wants this war. Other wars it at least seems like they tried to manufacture consent of public opinion. This one is just the government and the media operating on a script.”

As for the elites that are trying to sell this conflict to the American people, it’s fascinating how unsophisticated their methods have been. Aside from his endless stream of all-caps Truth Social posts, President Donald Trump is now literally just sharing screenshots of random OSINT accounts to confirm military actions. And Vice President JD Vance straight up said in a press conference this week, “I empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East. I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents.”

Also, while we’re on the subject of Vance: Does he have resting Tumblr voice? Much to consider there.

Cluely Is Probably The End Of Something

Cluely is a new AI startup that just raised $15 million thanks to venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. They’ve been using a bunch of that money to release zoomer slop viral videos about how their product will change the concept of “cheating.” If you’ve missed this whole thing, they’re building an “undetectable AI that sees your screen, hears your calls, and feeds you answers — in real time.” They also threw a party last week that had to be shut down by the cops because uninvited guests kept trying to sneak in. Very on brand. It’s all part of a buzzy culture play that, I’m sure, made the middle-aged reactionaries at Andreessen Horowitz feel very dangerous for investing in.

Anyways, if you don’t feel like investing $15 million to build the future of cheating, someone open-sourced Cluely and put it on Github. Also, white hat hacker Jack Cable opened up Cluely’s source code and found all the prompts that run their app. Cluely appears to be a wrapper running on GPT 4.1 and Claude Sonnet 3.7 currently. You can see the whole thing also on Github.

I actually think taking $15 million from Silicon Valley investors and burning it on TikTok videos and a pile of ChatGPT prompts counts as praxis. Nice work, comrades. We only need a few more Cluely’s to bankrupt the entire industry.

MrBeast Steps On The AI Rake

A company called Viewstats built an AI tool that makes YouTube thumbnails. If YouTube cared about the long-term health of their platform, this tool wouldn’t work at all. But YouTube has recently gone very much all in on AI and so it’s working pretty well, apparently. Viewstats decided to announce their new AI thumbnail tool in a now-deleted video with a plug from MrBeast. (MrBeast production team, unionize now!!)

Lots of folks are not happy about this, especially thumbnail artists, who are a real thing btw. A good thumbnail is responsible for like 80% of a YouTube video’s success. Another reason why YouTube should be cracking down on this.

“Hi thumbnail artist here, who's made 300 plus thumbnails and would not like my work to be used in your stupid little app thing,” X user @Holographicros3 wrote. “I never gave consent, I work really hard on each and every thumbnail and I would not like my work stolen.”

To which a dumb AI evangelist moron replied, “Think about it this way. Now you can make 300 thumbnails a day for your clients. And you probably won't even need to reduce prices for a while. If you can't beat them, join them.”

Is Italo Disco The Song Of The Summer?

There’s a good chance you’ve seen these two guys blasting cigs and drinking Aperol on social media feeds over the last few weeks. If you’re trying to figure out who they, they’re a DJ duo that goes by Mind Enterprises and the music they put out is a modern riff on Italo disco, which was a popular Italian genre of house music that was big in the 70s. And, yeah, they’re right. It’s Italo Disco summer, baby.

Two Good Posts About Love Island

Shot:

Chaser:

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a meatball sub at 70.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***