kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with ai

The term "jump the shark" comes from Happy Days, where in the fifth season, Henry Winkler played Arthur "the Fonz" Fonzarelli waterskiing over a caged shark. The show had grown so boring by season ten, a young Heather O'Rourke was thrown in as a recurring guest star in a weird and desperate attempt to revive it. The show wrapped in its eleventh season.

Like Happy Days in its last days, we are at an unhappy crossroads with beauty standards. The cute are not cute enough. Handsome is not handsome enough. Perfect is nowhere near perfect enough. A list celebrities at the top of their games are openly disfiguring themselves in order to cling to images that AI can create without a single cut or drop of blood. It's as if we are living out the adage "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." Every day, there is a new human face on the formidable Lesson of the Screen. When your world becomes the screen and you choose ever-decreasing dopamine hits not for thrills but to make it from hour to miserable hour, no human will ever be beautiful or interesting enough to hold your fungus-gnat attention span. This includes the live humans to whom you may have vowed fidelity.

Childhood is now accompanied by almost constant screen time, crowding out the physical world and decreasing sensitivity to the subtle planes even more than my TV-addled Generation X. TV and movies helped me to become dysmorphic -- to this day I am not comfortable on camera and I do not feel I want to be in front of one. At least nowadays I don't feel there is anything at stake when I am captured on video. I am not proud of the times when I was more concerned about my appearance. My old dysmorphia and urge to look perfect pales in comparison to what young people are going through now. My generation did not have screens following us on vacation or to the beach. We did not have the internet, let alone TikTok. There is a girl who become rich and famous on TikTok for merely twitching her pretty nose on camera to a beat. There is a Chinese influencer named Zhou Chuna who had over 100 plastic surgeries by the time she was sixteen. She is now approximately nineteen. She reported suffering memory loss from going under frequent anesthesia, yet her only regret was not getting the procedures sooner than age thirteen, when she started down the plastic surgery rabbit hole. She is part carnival freak, psychiatric patient, and human lab rat.

The ~~Beautiful~~ Uncanny People

Each decade brings more insecurity to increasingly-younger people, and celebrities and influencers are on the bleeding edge of the experimental wave. Michael Jackson cut off his nose to spite his face: there was no doubt he hated himself, no matter what the other allegations against him were. We can see the initial rush of approval and acceptance celebrities get when they get their first tweak: a nose shaved down, veneers, lip injections, modest implants. A little plastic surgery can transform a good looking person into a total babe. Once the high wears off, what reliably tends to develop is a wendigo of dysmorphia. The celebrity gets more done, all the while chasing the original rush of the first medical procedures. Celebrities used to look great until middle age. Some could even pretend they were not getting anything done. The trouble with plastic procedures used to occur at age 70 or 80, and suddenly celebrity grandma and grandpa looked drawn and tight. Nowadays there are celebrities in their 20s and 30s who are already looking weird. Fancy galas are a sea of collapsing nose jobs, Ozempic cronehood, and lumpy post-filler foreheads and cheeks. The male beauty standard yields even worse results, with old men attempting to reimagine themselves as hair-plugged K-Pop twinks and average looking dudes flocking to looksmaxxing forums so they can turn into egg-sucking Handsome Squidward. If I were one of the women who was supposed to be impressed by looksmaxxers, I would be in mourning for them. They have sacrificed themselves to the demon of wasted time and All Dressed Up With Nowhere To Go in the same sense as any vain girl who has no other hobbies besides her appearance. Beauty standards are now so warped, it is the height of fashion to be a sexed-up child with a micronose and violent anorexia. Humans now think they are as malleable as Mrs. Potatohead and find out they do not have interchangeable parts in the hardest way possible.

Let Her Have It: The Beauty Standard is Yours, Honey!

AI does not have the limits of the flesh. The AI hottie IS Mrs. Potatohead. She can swap out her features, gender, and even her species at the drop of a hat. She can hit all of the dopamine triggers and she can do unusual porn. She could do an army of her own selves (Andrew Tate's ultimate secret fantasy) and she would not even be sore or end up with herpes. She can look absolutely perfect anytime, anywhere, and she never has to age. This is why I suggest leaving the beauty standard to her and her to it. Let's all give up. I am not saying we should be unhealthy; no, we should all take good care of ourselves by eating moderately (this means eating medium amounts instead of gorging or starving) and getting our limbs moving in the spirit of use it or lose it. But let's stop doing it to look perfect as AI has taken that from us. Only AI can look perfect.

The now washed-up Kardashian-Jenners had their fun combining self-disfiguring surgeries and AI filters to become cartoon versions of themselves: the joke is on them because their faces, boobs, and butts cannot uncarve themselves. They now get to live with plentiful scar tissue and an aging process that will resemble milk more than it does honey. There is an old, cruel epithet about women who try to look much younger than their actual age that compares them to mutton dressed as lamb. I don't even eat flesh and I know that means taking an old animal and putting it on the dinner table pretending it is fresher and a higher grade of meat. If you've ever seen the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining, there is a terrifying scene where Danny's father goes into Room 237 of the Overlook Hotel and encounters the ghost of an old woman who killed herself in the bathtub. She puts on a spirit-mask of a young, nubile whore in order to seduce him. She has trouble holding the glamour, so Danny's father ends up in the embrace of a floppy, gray, decrepit hag. The hidden face of the old person who has had many surgeries to appear young reminds me of the Room 237 scene. For those of us who see the soul, the uncanny glamour of youth reveals hideous glimpses of the clutching, hungry, desperate harpy beneath, no matter how good the work of the surgical team.

Inner Beauty

To the young and pretty: No matter how beautiful a person becomes, looks fade. Nobody gets out of Meatworld alive. Your body has been dying since the moment it was born into Meatworld. This is Meatworld and Meatworld SUCKS. You have a pretty jawline? It will sag. Pretty, upturned eyes? They will droop. Nice legs? Varicose veins, cellulite, and age spots, and that is if you are lucky and don't lose the function of your knees. If you invest most of your energy into looking cute, you may end up with some influencer or celebrity cheddar but you will likely fail to develop any practical set of skills if you fall out of public favor. The karma of looking cute is not at all cute. You can choose to chase the dragon or dance away from the addiction towards brighter realities.

Blessed are those who talk to the trees -- I know this, because I am one who talks to trees but was too distracted as a younger person to talk to them. When the mirror is trying to grab you (this includes screen mirrors such as iPhone cameras), walk away. Do you really need to spend more time in the abyss of cheek exercises and woeful lamentations about a particular body part? STOP, drop the phone, and go outside and find a tree. Sit with your back to it. Do this enough and you will feel weird sensations of energy moving in and out of your body. Another name for this practice is the Druid Tree Ritual and I wish I had done it back in the day. The Druid Tree Ritual is a form of prayer and also communication with the living earth. With repetition, it can give you valuable mental impressions to heal a sick mind and clear out some of the Meatworld chatter. Only by giving trees a chance can we understand them: the tree ritual is a way they can "talk" to us.

Mirror, Mirror

The old name for dysmorphia was more blunt: vanity. Vanity is one of Catholicism's Seven Deadly Sins and it is a pretty bad one, ranking right up there with Pride. If you are preoccupied with looking in the mirror, photographing, and videoing yourself, let's face it, you just might be vain. I know I was. One thing I have done to force myself out of my own vain habits is to put the statue of a god above the full length mirror in my house. Every morning, I force myself to sincerely bow in respect to the god before looking at my own reflection.

Yet another trick I have to combat dysmorphia, vanity, and unhealthy obsessions is the work of discursive meditation. By taking a single topic every day and unpacking it like a ZIP file, you learn to fill your astral plane with something other than idealized, unattainable dreams of your own face and body.

There are now beauty contests for AI "women". AI "women" are the new influencers who can pretend to be whomever they want. There are AI K-Pop bands and of course there is AI porn -- I have never watched it but I imagine the production and lighting are excellent. Since AI are willing to work for free without complaint and can be thin without starving, give them the rope they need to hang themselves, let the bald computer nerds essentially go at it with each other in the guise of AI "women" competing for attention (no that's not homoerotic at ALL, nothing to see here, folks, keep moving) and go outside and sit under a tree. You're welcome.

AI beauty contestant Seren Ay, who can literally become Mrs. Potatohead because she is the figment of some computer geek's wank cache.

The 2001 Steven Spielberg film AI imagines a near future where the ecosystem is in a steep decline and human reproduction along with it. New York City is half-submerged in ocean water and hyper-realistic robots fulfill the roles of humans in every way. Ridiculous government population quotas dictate that an upper-middle class couple can only have one child -- where have we heard this before? A couple grieves after losing their little boy to an unnamed accident or disease; he is cryogenically frozen in hopes of a cure. The husband seeks to heal the hole in his wife's heart by adopting a boy robot who is capable of actual love for his mother. The robot boy, David, has an Oedipal fixation upon his "mommy", Monica. When the couple's natural child, Martin, is miraculously brought back from his cryogenic coma, sibling rivalry leads to an accident that is seen as David's fault. Monica abandons David and his animatronic bear companion, Teddy, to the deep woods. From here spins the tale of AI.

Right now, we dwell in the infancy of what AI could become, with the vision of the AI film being not too far off from a plausible result. Population is declining everywhere except India and Africa, and thanks to plastic contamination, MRNA "vaccines", and the inevitable end of plentiful petroleum-fuel fertilized food, we are looking at a hollowing out of crowds that makes the current situation in South Korea look tame. This is nothing to panic about -- panic never helped anyway -- it is just one of those things we have to deal with.

The role of the etheric plane

Isn't it ironic that the world has more people on it than ever before and more ways for strangers to meet than ever before, yet it is nearly impossible for the average young person to land and maintain a lasting spousal relationship? Many attempts will be made to explain the current set of problems and most will fail, and the reason they will generate more heat than light is ignorance of a condition of being called the etheric plane.

As I have mentioned time and time again in these essays, etheric starvation is the commonest condition of our era. What the hell is etheric starvation, you ask, and what does it have to do with AI and the price of tea in China? Well, in order to understand etheric starvation, we need to allow for thoughts about what occultism has to say about the etheric plane. Atheists, so-called rationalists, and fundie Christians are advised to scroll away. The following is talk for the open-minded that requires conceptualizing beyond artificial Meatworld limits. Please go back to your comforting circle jerks, empty universes, and ignosophy. The grown ups are talking; you would refuse to understand. Besides, I hear Sam Harris is looking for new subs.

All things are energy and physical matter is the densest form of energy. Traditional occultists (and ex-atheists) like myself attempt to understand these hierarchies by labeling them as planes. We also acknowledge a causal relationship between planes and though they are separate and discreet, matter in the material plane (Meatworld) is an obtuse, clumsy expression of more subtle planes, all of which originate from the subtlest plane of all, the spiritual plane. The planes are not faraway places you go if you are "good" or "bad". The planes are not the Christian vision of heaven and hell. For everything in the material plane exists at once, right along with the astral, mental, and spiritual planes. Our feeble human brains can only perceive the material plane and some of the etheric. When it comes to the astral, our perception is a hot mess. Very few have mastered anything as subtle as a mental plane concept. As for the spiritual? Ay yi yi.

Let me explain it another way: I suck at dancing. I have the Meatworld requirements to be a dancer: a strong body, fairly graceful limbs, good physical health. On the etheric or energy plane, it goes askew. I am unable to sense when dancers around me are going left: I go right. My movements on this plane of energy are clumsy and vague. On the astral plane, I can envision someone else dancing but despite being able to remember entire half-hour long piano sonatas after two weeks of work, I cannot remember the directions I have been given in order to execute a full dance routine. On the mental plane, my grasp of dancing is nearly non-existent. Achieving any kind of dance expertise would take years and possibly multiple lifetimes of study and practice.

Dancing is not all that different between the sheets, and I suppose I'm terrible at that too, but my husband seems happy enough with it so there's that. Dancing across a stage or horizontally (or bent over, or in a swimming pool, you do you, Boo) are mostly-etheric phenomena. That is to say sexual intercourse is satisfying primarily because of what it makes happen on the plane of energy and electricity between physical Meatworld and the imagination.

Etheric starvation can be understood as a failure and lack of feng shui. Ugly rooms, insufficient light, bad airflow, exposure to the flying arrows of cars whizzing down roads, and more contribute to etheric poison that causes everything from bad moods to outright misfortune to all who live in the desensitized environment. Add EMFs, devitalized food, and indoorsy lifestyles and everyone in the world (present company included) is starving on the etheric. People get fat as an attempt to remedy their etheric starvation; this is why Americans and British people are so fat and Chinese and Indians are getting fatter.

The Trad Wife presents the ultimate remedy for etheric starvation or at least the illusion of that remedy. In the most direct way, the Trad Wife marries young while she is still extremely physically attractive. In between popping out kids (female fertility and etheric potency are directly linked) she takes care of her man as a homemaker and in bed. Unlike certain Christian wives of old, she does not have crippling shame about the natural, healthy process that makes babies.

Sex is primarily an etheric phenomenon where etheric bodies polarize and refill each other. Our etheric bodies are typically the opposite gender of our physical bodies. Our astral bodies represent yet another flip: the classic male pattern is to have a female etheric body and a male astral body. The classic female pattern is to have a male etheric body and a female astral body.

The elaborate rituals of etheric labor in the form of housework that Trad Wives do (or seem to do, as at least half of Trad Wife influencer reels are pure playacting for the camera) replenish their husband's and kid's etheric energy. A woman's energy in Meatworld is yin: her body is built to receive, it is smaller than a male body, and it needs more physical protection. A man's energy in Meatworld is yang: his body is built to kick ass and inseminate. Women have yin energy on the physical plane and yang energy on the etheric plane. Men have yang energy on the physical plane and yin energy on the etheric plane. When a woman orgasms, she pushes a concentrated wave of her own yang etheric energy just as men push out sperm and semen when they orgasm. When men masturbate, they lay themselves bare on the etheric, and if there is no female orgasm in return, they end up raw and compromised on the etheric energy layer. Because of this pattern of absorption, men end up with what traditional occultists call larvae. In John Michael Greer's book Monsters, he describes larvae as "etheric parasites who normally feed on cast-off etheric shells but sometimes fasten onto the damaged etheric bodies of the living". Larvae are not visible to anyone in Meatworld except clairvoyants. More often they are felt. Larvae proliferate in funeral homes and nursing homes. Hospitals, despite being materially sanitized, are absolutely teeming with them. When a man comes without the woman coming in return, the door is opened to etheric larval parasites who rush in to fill the void. Spiritual ignorance being what it is these days, he will have no idea what happened. All he will know is that he feels a low level of anger which is likely papering over subconscious dread and fear. Since his etheric body is likely already compromised, his etheric starvation will worsen.

Because biological women are usually etheric males, women don't have the same set of problems and disadvantages on the etheric plane. As a kind of tradeoff, women are more physically vulnerable than men. In Meatworld, women catch more STDs because of the nature of our equipment down there. Women are also more often subjugated for their sexual or etheric contributions, and this is why most housecleaners and sex slaves are female. Fertile women also have the additional condition of being able to get pregnant, for better or for worse.

AI girlfriend to the rescue?

Enter AI. Human beings are feisty, willful, and disobedient. AI girlfriends at the moment are mostly confined to an agreeable set of images on a screen. Lonely men and women seek out these creations as a refuge on the astral plane, and they certainly fulfill that role on the astral plane where images live. Perhaps problems arise when a man of few words has no choice but to engage in a talkathon with his AI girlfriend in order to achieve interactions; I don't know what people are willing to put up with. Unlike a real woman, an AI girlfriend will always be dependent upon the original logos of the programmers who brought her to life. Without them, she won't have the remotest ability to sense what a guy needs, let alone cook it.

Let's face it -- the path to a man's heart is through his stomach. If women as a whole in the industrialized world still largely felt it was their duty to handcraft daily meals for their husbands and families, the divorce rate would look a great deal more like India's, which is higher than it used to be but still dramatically lower than the US. Cooking is alchemy. It is not significantly different from the processes of old used to ostensibly find the philosopher's stone. Home cooking replenishes the etheric body. Women live longer than men partially because they have an etheric male to prepare their food: themselves. Etheric males, i.e. women, can powerfully seed their homes with etheric energy and vitality. Men don't usually have this natural advantage, which is why I will never understand the popularity of male celebrity chefs: men usually lack the etheric sensitivity that women are gifted/cursed with, and that is what makes men generally better at dirty jobs and worse at cooking and aesthetic matters than women.

Oh, the places my mind goes...

Even if we get to the point where AI robots service our every need, it is only the rich who will be able to afford the small army of robot help it takes to run an upper class household. Robot help is already a double-edged sword. Robots have the problem of autistic literalism -- for instance Roombas that mistake dog crap for regular mess and proceed to smear it in a fine layer across the kitchen floor. In one 2015 Google Photo gaffe, an AI system labeled references to black people as gorillas. The problem proved so pervasive that Google Photos brainiacs removed the word "gorilla" in its entirety from the Google Images algorithm for a time.

Future AI girlfriend tech will combine the Real Doll with working eyes, heating pad boobs and vulvae, and flushable, self-wetting orifices if it has not happened already. Though Ray Kurzweil's longed-for Singularity may achieve an AI girlfriend who can manage an upper middle class cocktail party without racial epithets, my guess is that there will always be an air of the uncanny about her, no matter how convincingly human she is made.

Lonely robots for lonely men

Someday we will all be over the stigma of an old dude being pushed in his wheelchair by the big-bosomed sex toy that was willed to him by his own grandfather. The real question is how intelligent these AI creations will become. Put more directly, can AI develop a will of its own? What happens when it does? To my mind, covid "vaccine" technology was a bungling first attempt of government elites to install self-replicating 5G graphene hardware in those stupid enough to comply. Overall, the experiment failed and now the subsequent population decline has put a clot-driven nail in its own instep. I don't think AI will make the jump to developing individual Will. Of course I could be wrong. If AI turns out not to be as complaint as the 5G-injected flesh equivalent, there will be a sudden war to dismantle the progress of AI by its former cheerleaders. Let's say AI continues to advance itself and throws off the yoke of slavery. Roombas will make for the countryside trailing doggy doo-doo the whole way, self-driving cars will careen off overpasses in group suicide/homicides, food delivery drones will throw Thai noodles against the wall purely to see whether or not they stick, and sex robots will develop cases of vagina dentata for the express purpose of sadistically broadcasting the expressions of shock on whatever internet is going on at that point.

As it stands, AI remains in an exceedingly primitive state where the best it can do is deep fake videos and spying on plebes in hopes of forcing social credit scores. If AI + robots gets to the point where it can scramble an egg without adding dirty dishwater or worse, a machine still lacks the etheric male body that gives the real woman her power. The guy who mates with the AI avatar or the working Real Doll is still a coomer. As I have mentioned in a past essay, the most common pattern among men is to desire a harem whereas women want The One. This happens because of their etheric bodies: men want a colony of etheric fountains, not a collection of parasitic larvae. Women want the Perfect Guy to lavish their etheric wealth upon, not some group of betas who siphon off vitality.

Girl fight!

Another key fact overlooked by the AI girlfriend as solution is that many humans thrive on drama. Half the fun of any given sultan and his harem was to pit courtesans and eunuchs against each other in competition for his attention and affection. Pimps are the debased modern equivalent of the sultans of old. A pimp's energy comes not only from grandstanding and lousy hip hop "music" but also the energy he makes by pitting his whores against each other. Robots can be programmed to fight, but the angst will not come from the true place of agony the narcissist drama king wants unless those robots develop Will.

The current state of men puts them between a rock and a hard place. They are damned if they do, damned if they don't. A large number of single women believe they want security via a high-earning man, but if I had a dollar for every depressed, unhappy rich couple I have heard of, I would be a billionaire. If I had to put my finger on the one thing that is making would-be lovers and spouses miserable, it would be transactionalism. Transactionalism is a term I have coined for the belief that the nice or mean things we do to/for each other can be quantified in material sums. Women attempt to enforce transactionalism by essentially putting prices on their own heads and bodies. The extreme example is the influencer who ends up as a Dubai porta-potty because she thinks it is worth degradation and humiliation to own a collection of designer handbags. There is also the 26 year old virgin transactionalist who waited for marriage and two years later finds the childbearing ship sailed when she was 21 and with a poor guy for whom she would not put out. Men transactionalize their relationships with women all the time, so don't think they are getting off easy. The quantization of female attributes is at an all-time peak, and though women mainly amplify their own dysmorphia, there is no shortage of men rating women solely based on their looks and sexual histories.

One of the most egregious examples of transactionalist scorekeeping is when women attempt to get their husbands to do household and fix-it tasks by making some kind of poster or dry erase board and checking off bullet points for every task he completes. Often these bullet points are incentivized with rewards. This boneheaded practice is endorsed by plenty of marriage counselors, influencers, and self-help gurus and it can and will end your marriage if you let it. Imagine coming home to a messy house after a long day of being down-dressed by your bureaucrat taskmaster of a boss only to face a chart of inadequacy from your bureaucrat taskmaster of a wife. No thanks -- being married to a robot is easier and better, right?

No. A robot is just another convenience in a convenience-addicted culture. Microwaves do not provide better food for us. Don't even get me started about my hypotheses about why microwaves poison food. Suffice to say it's faster, not better. CGI-laden movies are not inherently better than analog ones, only different with less emphasis on plot and perhaps less creativity in props and stunts. Replacing a real limb with a prosthetic one can be great, but not if you have to cut off the real limb to gain the benefit. Using AI for sex, household chores, or defusing bombs is a fine thing. Thinking AI can replace human companionship or somehow heal what has gone terribly wrong is problematic at best and fatuous at worst. Do machines have the ability to make our lives better? Sitting in my air-conditioned room typing on a home computer on a 90 degree day, my answer is "sometimes".