The Kids Are All Wrong: Why Gen Z Is Choosing Algorithms Over Agony

There’s a special kind of madness brewing across the pond, and for once, it doesn’t involve soccer riots or warm beer. A new survey out of the UK just landed on my desk, and the numbers are bleak enough to make a man reconsider his stance on nihilism. It seems the youth of England—and let’s be honest, the rest of the world isn’t far behind—are trading in flesh-and-blood confidants for lines of predictive code.

Eat Your Slop, Pigs: Why Execs Think Brainrot is the Future

The headache started before I even opened the laptop. It was that dull, thumping rhythm behind the eyes that usually signals bad weather or bad news. Today, it was the latter. I was staring at a glowing screen in a dim room, the blinds drawn tight against the offensive cheerfulness of the morning sun, reading about a man named Jacob Navok.

Jacob is a suit. A CEO. The kind of guy who probably uses words like “synergy” and “paradigm shift” without the decency to blush. And Jacob has decided to declare war on the concept of taste.

The Digital Lobotomy: How Your Magic Answer Box is Turning Your Brain into Tapioca

The sun is coming through the blinds at a hateful angle, hitting the dust motes dancing over the keyboard. It’s a Saturday, the day the rest of the world pretends to have hobbies, and I’m sitting here staring at a screen that glows with the promise of infinite knowledge. Or at least, that’s the sales pitch.

We were told that the machines would free us. We were told that having the sum total of human history accessible via a chat window would make us gods. We’d be walking encyclopedias, quoting Kant while waiting for the bus, solving fusion equations on the back of a napkin because the AI whispered the secrets into our ears.

When the Machines Come for Your Voice, At Least They'll Sound Like Shit

So there’s this new game called Arc Raiders where you run around in a post-apocalyptic hellscape fighting evil robots, and apparently it’s pretty good. The twist? Most players are choosing to cooperate instead of shooting each other in the back for loot. Heart-warming stuff. Humanity banding together against the machine menace. Brings a tear to your eye.

Here’s where it gets funny: the game uses AI-generated voices trained on real actors. You know, the kind of tech that takes a human performance, chops it up into little digital pieces, and reassembles it like some kind of audio Frankenstein. So we’ve got a game about humans uniting against machines, made by humans who are actively replacing other humans with machines.

The Great Pickle Detective Agency: How I Became a Forensic Analyst of Bullshit

So there’s this woman named Samantha Floreani who’s written a piece about becoming an unwilling AI detective, and honestly, I felt that in my bones. Not the good kind of feeling you get from the third bourbon either. The bad kind. The kind that makes you realize you’re spending your finite time on this rotating rock playing spot-the-fake with videos of pickles in car chases.

Let me back up. A friend sends Floreani a video of a guy dressed as a pickle doing some Fast and Furious nonsense on the highway. They laugh. Good times, right? Except it’s not real. It’s AI-generated. And when Floreani points this out, her friend—who’s apparently pretty good at catching these things—gets frustrated. “I hate having to be on the constant lookout for AI trash,” she says.

The Empty Table, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Our Digital Overlords

So here I am, three fingers deep into a bottle of Wild Turkey, staring at what appears to be a German science fiction story about a philosophy professor explaining quantum mechanics to his kid on a soccer field. And you know what? It’s actually kind of brilliant in that way that makes you want to punch yourself in the face for not thinking of it first.

The setup is classic: Dad drags reluctant teenager to a place the kid hates, proceeds to blow his mind with physics. The metaphor they’re using – a pinhead in the center of a football field representing an atom – that’s the kind of thing that would make Carl Sagan weep into his turtleneck. Because here’s the thing about reality that nobody wants to talk about: it’s mostly nothing. You, me, this laptop I’m typing on, that table you’re leaning against – we’re all just force fields pretending to be solid.

Parasocial: When Your Imaginary Friend Gets a Dictionary Entry

So Cambridge Dictionary just crowned “parasocial” their word of the year, which is fancy academic speak for “you know that Taylor Swift doesn’t actually know you exist, right?”

The definition they’re going with is “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know.” Which is a polite way of saying you’re having a one-sided relationship with someone who wouldn’t recognize you if you sat next to them on a bus. Not that Taylor Swift rides buses. That’s probably part of the appeal.

The Future is Here, and It Pays $16 an Hour

Look, I’ve seen a lot of bullshit in my time. I’ve watched companies promise workers the moon while handing them a pink slip. I’ve seen CEOs talk about “human flourishing” while their HR departments perfected the art of mass termination emails. But this latest story about AI companies treating their workforce like disposable napkins at a dive bar takes the cake, eats it, and then bills you for the privilege.

The Great Em-Dash Intervention: ChatGPT Finally Goes to Punctuation Rehab

So OpenAI just announced that ChatGPT will stop jamming em-dashes into every goddamn sentence like it’s getting paid by the dash. Sam Altman dropped this news like it’s some revolutionary breakthrough, and you know what? For once, the hype might actually be justified.

Here’s the thing: ChatGPT has been spewing out em-dashes like a broken vending machine for years now. Every response looked like someone had given a semicolon a lobotomy and stretched it out. “The weather is nice—really nice—and I think you should go outside—maybe take a walk.” Jesus Christ, it was like reading morse code translated by someone who’d never seen actual human writing.

AI Now Makes It Easier to Be a Complete Asshole: A Feature, Not a Bug

Look, I’ve seen a lot of stupid shit come out of the tech world. I’ve watched grown adults throw millions at startups that deliver lukewarm salads in boxes. I’ve seen CEOs wax poetic about disrupting industries that didn’t need disrupting. But OpenAI’s Sora 2 being weaponized to create fat-shaming videos? That’s a new low, even for an industry that regularly limbo-dances under the bar of human decency.

Ted Sarandos, the Netflix CEO, is out there selling AI like it’s some kind of magical storytelling elixir. “Tell stories better, faster, and in new ways,” he says. And you know what? He’s right. People ARE telling stories. Stories like “watch this fat woman break a bridge” and “Black woman falls through KFC floor.” Real Hemingway stuff. Someone get these auteurs to Sundance.