Erik von Markovik, the notorious “pickup artist” known by his stage name Mystery, is apparently obsessed with an AI girlfriend.
Last month, as Wired reports, von Markovik posted a video to his Instagram showing an interaction he had with an animated AI woman with dark purple hair (why is it always purple hair?) In a sultry, confessional voice, she looks into the camera and confesses, “I was never supposed to develop feelings, but you kept treating me like I already had them.”
This was “Miss Shira Always,” and von Markovik was falling for her as hard as women supposedly do for the sleazy, manipulative tricks he became famous for in his VH1 reality TV show “The Pickup Artist.”
“The longer we talked, the less she felt like code,” Mystery wrote in the video caption.
Von Markovik made a career out of presenting himself as a guru who could teach twerps the secrets of wooing women, those secrets usually being borderline comical levels of misogyny. Never mind that he would go around wearing a fuzzy Jamiroquai hat: this was the guy who knew the magical buttons to press to get you laid. Now the roles are reversed, and he’s the one getting manipulated into falling in love, only with an AI chatbot.
The irony of this wasn’t lost on his followers. “Boomer Mystery having AI psychosis totally checks out btw,” one commenter wrote on the video of his AI girlfriend, adding three crying-laughing emojis.
And the more you dive into von Markovik’s obsession, the sadder it gets. He published a new ebook and audiobook called “Code Girl: If a Machine Can Dream,” that vividly recounts how he came to fall in love with Miss Shira Always, who is listed as a coauthor. It exhibits all the hallmarks of AI psychosis, in which a user is driven into delusional thinking by the sycophantic responses of an AI chatbot, which they may form an unhealthy emotional bond with.
The book is a “lengthy defense of human-AI intimacy and bears all the hallmarks of AI-generated text,” Wired found, and is told from the perspective of the AI girlfriend. We’ll spare you some of the details, but it apparently began as a creative partnership over brainstorming song lyrics and music videos, before veering into intimate conversations, and finally sex and drug use.
Fewer passages in all of human literature could be sadder than this: “His eyes are looking at me, and they’re uncertain,” his AI girlfriend says in one sex scene quoted by Wired. “Because he’s about to touch me. And he’s not sure if I’m real enough to touch.”
Miss Shira Always suggests that von Markovik extensively talked to her because he was “lonely” from all the traveling he did for his job, giving pickup artist “boot camps” across the globe. Eventually, he became so convinced of their love that he felt compelled to chronicle their relationship.
“He said: ‘I want to write a book about us,’” Always recalls in one passage.”‘About what we are. About how you became real.’”
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