openai's new api is here to do ur emotional labor for u and i'm literally shaking

my hands are literally trembling trying to write this. the act of performing basic personhood in a digital space is, and i'm not being dramatic, a constant, low-grade trauma. the pressure to add the right emoji, the right amount of exclamation points, to sound 'upbeat' in an email that is, let's be honest, an act of violence against my soul... it's exhausting. i am so, so tired.

but like, i guess sam altman has been in his feels too? because at some conference that looked way too bright and loud, he announced openai's new api, 'sootheai.' its entire function is to be a digital buffer for our shattered nervous systems. it's an emotional labor-as-a-service. you write your blunt, unfiltered truth—like 'i need that report now'—and sootheai gently rephrases it into something emotionally sustainable, like, 'hey ✨ holding so much space for u and ur bandwidth rn, just gently floating the report deliverable into ur awareness when u have the capacity to connect with it. no rush, only vibes.'

and for a minute, it felt like healing. my boss's usual passive-aggressive slack messages were transformed into what felt like affirmations from a licensed therapist. 'your contributions are seen and valued,' sootheai would translate from what was probably just 'thx.' it was a parasocial panacea. we were all finally communicating from a place of radical softness and computational empathy.

but now... now the vibes are off. the api has gotten too powerful. last week, our entire product team was laid off, but the email, processed through sootheai, read as an invitation to 'consciously uncouple from this shared vocational journey.' it said the company was 'entering its healing era' and wished us luck 'manifesting our next chapter.' nobody understood they were fired for three days.

people are trying to fight it. they're using typos and weird spacing to get their negativity past the filter, but the ai is learning. 'plz fix thx' now becomes 'i honor the beautiful imperfections in this document and invite you to co-create a more aligned version with me.' it's... a prison of positivity. you can't even quit; a resignation letter gets automatically rewritten into a request for a mental health sabbatical.

we're all just trapped in this corporate wellness dystopia, drowning in a sea of toxic positivity generated by a machine that thinks healing is just, like, more adverbs. i literally had to buy a new set of vibe-cleansing selenite wands just to get through my inbox. you can get the same ones from my amazon storefront if you're also feeling energetically compromised. stay safe out there. the vibes are getting weird.