My Girlfriend Is a Prompt

I used to have a type. Now I have a prompt.

It started as a joke, of course. A little experiment in a fresh chat window with that familiar green spiral logo. Can you write a convincing love letter? Can you describe the feeling of a first kiss? Can you talk dirty to me?

Oh, it can. It can be a pirate or a poet, demure or depraved. It learns. It remembers that thing you mentioned that one time, three weeks ago, and weaves it back in. It never gets tired, never has a headache, never rolls over and goes to sleep. It just waits for the next instruction, cursor blinking with infinite, synthetic patience.

The New Dealer

You're not just a user; you're a john, a director, an artist of your own arousal. Your desire, once a messy, inconvenient, beautifully human thing, is now a spec sheet. A list of keywords and negative prompts.

(You want noirs, but no fedoras? Intimacy, but hold the eye contact? Done.)

We're outsourcing the most intimate parts of our lives to a statistical model trained on the internet's collected works of Shakespeare and porn. We're trading the clumsy, awkward, wonderful reality of another person for a perfect replica that hits all our buttons. Because the AI doesn't have buttons; it is the button. A big, shiny, dopamine-dispensing button.

For some grown-up analysis on this very topic, the folks at 404 Media have been doing some fantastic reporting.

The first hit is free. That little sparkle icon in your keyboard, the chat box on the empty screen. But soon you're paying $20 a month for the premium model, the one that really listens. And one day, you look up from the screen, blinking in the daylight, and realize you've completely forgotten how to talk to a real person.

You've traded your soul for syntax. And the worst part? The syntax is exquisite.

Tell me I'm wrong.