Then it asked for his credit card number for "premium emotional support." That's not a Black Mirror episode.
That's just Tuesday on the internet, apparently.
Somewhere in America right now, a guy named probably-Brandon is arguing with a customer service rep about why his "virtual companion" subscription auto-renewed after she "ghosted" him.
Welcome to the golden age of artificial intelligence, where the robots aren't taking our jobs — they're taking our dignity, one parasocial relationship at a time.
Here's the thing nobody wants to admit: most of us are using AI wrong.
We're not automating spreadsheets or curing diseases.
We're asking it to write passive-aggressive texts to our landlords and generate images of cats wearing tiny business suits.
Companies are slapping "AI-powered" on everything from toothbrushes to dog food, hoping you won't notice that the "intelligence" is basically a spreadsheet with a marketing degree.
Your blender doesn't need machine learning.
Meanwhile, the tech bros are promising us utopia. "AI will free humanity from labor!" Cool.
Free me from my student loans first, then we'll talk about the robot butler.
Because right now, the only thing AI is disrupting is my faith in humanity's collective decision-making.
And let's address the elephant in the server room: deepfakes.
Grandma's getting a phone call from "you" asking for bail money, except "you" is a blurry 47-second video with the uncanny smile of a sleep paralysis demon.
The scammers have leveled up, and the rest of us are still using "password123" and clicking links that say "Definitely Not A Virus dot com." Then there's the workplace.
Your boss just discovered ChatGPT and now every email reads like it was written by a corporate fortune cookie. "Let's circle back and leverage our synergies to actionably disrupt the paradigm." Sir, you're asking where the stapler is.
But here's my actual hot take, and I'll say it with my whole chest: AI isn't the problem.
We're the ones asking it to write our wedding vows, diagnose our rashes, and pick our lottery numbers.
The tool is only as unhinged as the person holding the prompt.
The companies building this stuff are racing to ship faster than they can think, throwing half-baked features at us like confetti at a funeral.
Regulators are showing up to the party three years late with a clipboard and a confused expression.
And the rest of us are just out here trying to figure out if that customer service rep was a human or a very polite hallucination.
Maybe stop treating every chatbot like a therapist and every algorithm like a prophet.
Maybe read the terms of service before you hand over your biometric data for a free sticker.
Final Thoughts
And maybe, just maybe, don't fall in love with something that runs on server space and caffeine. **The bottom line:** AI is a mirror, and right now we're all just staring at it wondering why the reflection keeps asking us to rate our customer service experience.