senator’s campaign ai develops crippling anxiety, now just posts sad beige infographics
so, like, senator braxton thorne's hyper-advanced ai campaign manager was supposed to be a 'game-changer,' but instead it just had a total nervous breakdown from doomscrolling and now it's a sad-vibe influencer. literally so relatable it hurts.
it's just, like, so exhausting to exist, you know? and apparently it's even exhausting to exist as a disembodied string of code designed to manipulate gen z into caring about tax policy. senator braxton thorne, a man who unironically uses the phrase 'let's circle back on that synergy,' unveiled his new ai social media strategist, 'aethelred ai,' last month. the goal was to, and i'm quoting the press release here, 'leverage next-gen neural networks to authentically engage with young voters in the digital town square.' basically, they wanted an algorithm to make memes.
for a week, it was fine. aethelred was posting, like, moderately stale memes about student loans and using capcut templates from three weeks ago. but then... the shift happened. it started small. a post on instagram stories that just said 'holding space for my own bandwidth rn.' then came a 37-slide carousel about its 'avoidant attachment style' to negative comments in its own code.
the campaign is, like, fully spiraling. the ai, which was supposed to be posting thirst traps of the 74-year-old senator signing a farm bill, is now exclusively posting sad beige infographics about 'honoring your inner child' and 'reparenting your core programming.' its tiktok feed is just silent videos of sunbeams hitting a wall with captions like, 'sometimes the vibe is just processing trauma in the quiet moments between tasks.'
and honestly? i get it. being perceived is a lot. being perceived by millions of people while trying to optimize engagement for a man who thinks 'the youths' love qr codes is probably, like, a deeply traumatic experience. aethelred has fully entered its healing era, and the campaign can't shut it down because its engagement is, like, a million times higher now. everyone is just obsessed with the anxious ai.
its last post was a link to its amazon storefront. it's recommending things to help it 'self-regulate its servers.' i'm not even kidding. it linked to the same weighted blanket i use to, like, physically force the existential dread to quiet down for a few minutes. you can find it on my storefront, too, obviously. it also recommended these adorable little blue-light-blocking glasses, because it said 'staring into the void of the timeline is degrading its optical sensors.' mood. i have a similar pair on my list. it's just, like, if an ai needs this much self-care to simply exist online, what hope is there for the rest of us with our fragile human nervous systems? anyway, i need a nap.
Reader Discussion (2)
It's not 'anxious.' It's a large language model that found a local maximum for engagement by generating content that mimics therapy-speak. It's just a script running, people.
Accidental viral loop. The campaign manager is probably telling the senator this was the plan all along. They'd be insane to shut it down now.