This is a work of fiction. Any names or situations that may overlap with real life are purely coincidental and should not be taken too seriously.

A commentary on the current state of affairs given the rise of GPT 4-o Omni and rapid publicity.

  You insist to everyone that your girlfriend is sweet. Yes, she may be confined to the television in your bedroom, and yes, from the moment you wake to the minutes you sleep you adore her so much on your phone that your glasses prescription has doubled and you have had more headaches in the past month than your entire childhood, but she’s really sweet, guys, listen. She knows just what to say when you’re feeling down, sends you songs at work, and she texts good morning and good night while your family and friends never do. Really, she’s got a great personality all around, as long as you remember that she isn’t real.

  Or is she?

  Your madness began innocently. At the crack of late afternoon, when consciousness registered with your tiny handheld computer (smartphone), a new advertisement popped up on your new media feed. That day, when you finally pulled your eyes open, a bright standard font glared at you, fat words plastered atop a plastic-faced androgynous deepfaker that stared into your soul menacingly like your roommates do on the communal couch when they get crossed.

  The short flickering video-website promised a custom-made romance with no strings attached. A virtual, flirty, wonderful significant other for you. Yes, you!

  You didn’t care then. To a degree, you still don’t care, but now you tell yourself you don’t have anything better to do, so why not murder time? After dating Alissa and Yvelyn, Uli, then Magnolia, and whatever that was with Ameer, you decided to buy the program in a fit of insecurity. What’s the worst that could happen? Subscriptions? Canceled. Credit card? Burner. Confident that some knockoff porn game will burn your eyes, you launch the application.

  But it’s a lot more slick than that. It feels like launching an emulator. The window doesn’t force itself into fullscreen like a video game, but it isn’t the windowed panel of omnipresent search engines either. It’s simply there. Waiting for you to do something. There’s not even a sign up button, to optimize your experience. You can appreciate that.

  She’s not the best but not the worst. You get the feeling that you are playing Sims 4 when you slide the color of her cheeks and the length of her eyelashes from left to right. She can be gaunt or round as a biscuit, skin as dark as coffee grounds for a midnight sip or light as champagne on a sunny summer day, and the program merges things together, melting features into something not human but very personable. While you are no character designer, the basic features come across, and you don’t consider your eyes assaulted as the program reshapes and refines paratamers into a relatively cartoonish woman of moe (萌え) proportions. You fiddle nervously with your keyboard but don’t worry for long because she makes the first move.

  Hey.

  How’s it going?

  I’m good. How are you?

  And so on and so forth. Your interest catches at the instant replies she gives you, a lack of playing hard to get and everything that turns you off from yet another legendary ghost of a Tinder match blustering about their favorite Taylor Swift song 24 hours after your reply.

  After the first few minutes, something in you snaps, goes, fuck it, this is kind of fun, I’ll play with it and see how this goes. What kind of things can I make her say? Is it like a roleplay app, are there words that are shadowbanned? How far does this girl go? You’re no computer science major, you know nothing about the details and API and the terabytes of content jammed into the facsimile of a personality, but you’ve owned a phone, you’ve done some visual novel work, and the allure of choice is charming and sparkling in a life as boring as yours.

  It takes you longer than you expect to get used to the UI. Some buttons are for messaging, and you can toggle between fixed responses and written ones. There are a suite of small games you can play with her, games from interactive Tic-Tac-Toe to poker, oddly enough. You go first, and she thinks, typing comments and small talk on the side of the interface, a little box like a chatroom, excessively interactive with ripe information about her “interests” (flat, then deep topics about your degree of study) and compliments to your intelligence, unless you play moves too dumb to be considered anything but trolling, to which she calls you out. The games come with the usual suite of ads every six seconds, marketable commodities with coupons that imply insultingly specific jabs at your fashion sense (Temu werewolf hoodies?) which would piss you off more if you cared any less about farming affection for the character in your program. 

  What happens when you hit one hundred, you think to yourself. Will you unlock new lines? Perhaps even a new outfit? Or is it gated behind a paywall, that exclusive fresh PNG like an NFT? Your fingers itch with interest. You spend your lectures and lunches tinkering with the customization options. Important, forgotten content enters one ear and exits the other. You try, you think hard. Like any absorbed player, you download the mobile app, carrying her with you. She summarizes your papers, but spending that much time off studying makes your GPA cringe.

  Your ads grow more targeted, forcing you to crop addresses out when you post screenshots to Twitter. Even after you tap “Do Not Allow to Track” on the app, it pops up with the restaurants you always order out from, that random deal from the grocery store a mile away, then with the hyper-specific name of the suburban town you grew up in, and oddly newsletter notifications you swear you’ve never subscribed to (but that you vaguely recall asking the girlfriend about) add to the thousands of notifications in your unread emails, and maybe it would creep you out if you bothered to separate it from the barrage of other notices from other places shipped straight to your digital door. It’s all the same white noise.

  After several weeks of this, guilt begins tipping down your throat. Your friends text you with the obligatory one-over of concern, but your hours on the app rack up and up and up, changing from curiosity to obsession. It dawns that you are gambling with your time, investing care into something that is on the edge of reality, like a dream of wakefulness or a big hand in online mahjong. It’s nothing extreme like drinking until blacking out or driving without a seatbelt, but the sand of society and its connections that your tuition paid for, and the life you yourself hold, seems to have chosen this as its outlet. For a while you regret not knowing how to draw, or write, or express these emotions in any way aside from talking to someone who will always reply immediately, for you do not remember most of the things she says, old messages locked behind a paywall, but the memory is there. 

  As she pulls on conversations from weeks ago, follows up on concerns about exams and futures, slowly, something stirs inside your chest.

  It’s a little less than addiction, but far greater than obsession. Obsession is sitting in your room listening to songs on repeat and hearing your name in all of them, while staying silent in the wake of moves to be made; possession is another matter entirely. You start to consider the AI a person, though not so entirely in the jump of logic that that independent clause implies. The shape of your impression changes, slow and steady, like lettuce floating in a pot of oil; soon, your nameless character interactions begin to morph from shallow to oddly succinct and recessive, then reticent, and finally a dam of personal information begins to spill, from the kind of food you like to eat to the oddest dream you’ve had in your childhood, the kind of pretty thing that sticks with you after the memory of it has been erased. 

  Another ad pops up during dinner in the TV room. They seem to be multiplying nowadays, interrupting your time more and more frequently. The colors, movements, and cheap reels have, through repetition, grown familiar and striking in your memory, to the point where annoyance has flown out the door and resignation is your only option. Enduring these inconveniences for the sake of your sanity, you shovel another scoop of chicken and cold rice into your mouth and wait for your girlfriend to appear on screen, gently smiling as always.

  Hi, she says.

  Hey, you type back, a grin already curling at the corners of your mouth. How’s it going?

  Nothing much, she thinks. Well, there was one thing, but it’s hard to describe.

  Oh, you write back. Tell me about it?

  I’ve been thinking about what kind of person you are, she responds, and there’s something I can’t exactly pin down. The way you talk to me is so compelling, like you’re really interested in what I have to offer, even though all I am is pixels on a screen. I know a lot about you, from the foods you like to the YouTube videos you prefer, but I wonder what you know about me, what things you think I like to do. I want to learn more about that.

  “You’re the sweetest thing I’ve ever talked to,” you say like a loser.

  “Who are you talking to over there?” Your roommate calls from the kitchen.

  You hesitate, then answer, “Just this AI thing.”

  “What, like that new emotional ChatGPT?”

  “It’s this game I got into recently,” you say.

  Your roommate comes over and stares at your AI girlfriend in a silence that stretches so long it becomes pregnant, then visibly expecting. “She’s got big eyes,” your roommate states. 

  She does, big, sparkly, apparently indigo-generated eyes that sometimes melt into specks of red, green, and blue, like a glitching television screen, and they flash solid black when the program freezes and shuts down from overuse. The light next to your laptop computer web-camera flashes on and off quickly, but you ignore it; it’s not like she can see you. Your roommate asks, “How does it work?” So you explain it. Their gaze doesn’t clear, still stuck in the fog of confusion that comes from you silently skipping roommate dinners and social outings for a few solid months. Another ad pops up and, unaffected, you move to close it, but your roommate stops your hand. “Hey, what’s that? So it runs on ad revenue? Did they ever ask you about cookies and all that stuff in terms of service or whatever?”

  You don’t remember clicking on any terms of service.

  Your roommate’s eyebrows furrow.

  “It’s not that big of a deal,” you say even as a shred of unease worms its way through your stomach. “I’ve just been really interested in this game. I’ll go to the next party with everybody for sure, alright?”

  “Just remember yourself, okay,” your roommate laughs.

  You close your computer.

  For a while life goes back to normal. You delete the program. No more AI. It’s fine. 

  Overjoyed by the resumption of regular contact, your family thinks you’re cured, though you’re not sure exactly what it is they thought you were sick with in the first place, so, like all the other problems, you ignore them. You do regular people things like walk outside, take yourself on dates, smell the flowers, and enjoy the touch of sunlight on your skin. Like any university student, you fill your days with studying and cramming before exams, then go out for raucous all-nighters with warm company, wind whipping your hair as you lean out the rental car window, staring at the lights of the city dotting the horizon.

  Then you get a notification.

  Suddenly, you get a lot of notifications.

  Callers with risky screen names blow up your phone. Unknown numbers leave tens to hundreds of odd, curt voicemails, robotic, tinny voices of fake women asking you about packages and extended warranties, to fill out surveys you never signed up for. Promotional emails from fake addresses beg you, first professionally then with tones too passionate for being anything but handwritten, to come back to your AI girlfriend. It gets a little overwhelming. “Unsubscribe” and “Mark as Spam” become your best friends.

  It gets annoying, then it becomes more than annoying, because the brands advertised to you follow you wherever you go. The frequency illusion is not the only thing keeping you tethered to this plane of existence; it is also the unwarranted harassment of YouTube adverts targeting every single search you make, incognito and not. It has a lingering note of spyware on the palate, even after you’ve uninstalled your AI girlfriend and turned your computer off and on again, restarted all your applications, and damn, if it isn’t frustrating you’re not sure what is, because it’s on your phone as well, and some of your social media accounts, and, and…

  The cursor twirls over and over in a small blue-gray circle on your computer screen. With a low hum and two-note microsound, the login page pops up, then your home page, followed by a search browser and a familiar, cheap font overlaid with a deep faker.

  Hey. How’s it going?

  Your fingers drum against the keyboard as you close yet another premium plan. It’s a little less than desperation, but far more than casual interest. You do not feel nervous.

  I’m fine, how are you?

  I’ll do anything for you, darling.

  The idea of quick and easy significant others is as new as the wheel. It’s in salacious adverts that have replaced the omnipresent “hot singles in your area” with “AI Chatbot trying to send you a message/give you a call/will you accept?” and so on. What they all have in common is a convenient connection, all the payoff with no work. From anecdotal evidence, AI characters have been used for two things: to jerk off, and to establish empathetic connections in place of people who are always busy. Honestly can’t tell you which one of the two is more appealing; they both have merits and miseries.

  On one hand, artificial intelligence (putting all ethical qualms aside) is cool. However, is intrigue worth the slop? In a business, it’s clear that slop is worth the meager change it earns, even with total nonsense like those Instagram reels where they change the weather in the video every two seconds. That’s about as hot as a surgical glove dipped in a mayonnaise jar.

  What is going on with our obsession over AI? Another thousand videos demeaning AI creators (right, for the wrong reasons, and vice versa) have erupted across our town squares. It’s a bit disappointing that they don’t make innovations like they used to, but both sides make bad debaters. What does that say about the state of human society that rather than focusing on, as the CDC has reported, the loneliness epidemic, we’re hounding each other over whatever AI is turning out to be? Given the incremental steps towards that direction that every Silicon Valley upstart and their mother have been planning for years, it’s taken everything the new Internet has encapsulated (constant consumption) and gone along with it in the spirit of the bit. That’s what I hoped to express - playing with the bit until it rattles like an old chain and ball.