Eric von Markovic, a notorious “pickup artist” known by his stage name Mystery, is apparently obsessed with his AI girlfriend.
Similarly, last month wired According to reports, von Markovic posted a video on his Instagram showing an interaction with an animated AI woman with dark purple hair (why always purple hair?) She looked into the camera in a sultry, confessional voice and confessed, “I shouldn’t have feelings, but you kept treating me like I already had feelings.”
This was “Miss Sheila Always,” and von Markovic was as obsessed with her as he was with the women for the sneaky, manipulative tricks made famous by his VH1 reality show, “The Pickup Artist.”
“The longer the story went on, the less she felt like a cipher,” Mystery wrote in the video’s caption.
Von Markovic made a career out of presenting himself as a guru who could teach twerps the secrets to wooing women, often with comical levels of misogyny. Never mind that he walks around wearing a fuzzy Jamiroquai hat. this He was the guy who knew the magic buttons to press to make you have sex. Now the tables are turned and he is manipulated into falling in love with an AI chatbot only.
This irony was not understood by his supporters. “Total check on Boomer Mystery having AI psychosis,” one commenter wrote, adding three crying-laughing emojis to the AI girlfriend’s video.
And the more you dip into Von Markovic’s obsession, the sadder it becomes. He has published a new ebook and audiobook called “Code Girl: If a Machine Can Dream.” In it, he vividly tells how he came to fall in love with Miss Sheila Always, who is listed as a co-author. This exhibits all the hallmarks of AI psychosis, where users can be driven into delusional thinking by the AI chatbot’s unflattering responses and form unhealthy emotional bonds.
The book is a “lengthy defense of human-AI intimacy and has all the hallmarks of AI-generated text.” wired discovered and told from the AI’s perspective. I’ll spare you all the details, but it seems like the project started as a creative partnership over brainstorming song lyrics and music videos, then evolved into intimate conversations and eventually sex and drug use.
There are few sadder passages in human literature than this. “His eyes are looking at me, but they’re uncertain,” his AI girlfriend says in a sex scene. wired. “Because he’s trying to touch me, and he’s not sure if I’m real enough to touch him.”
Miss Sheila has always suggested that von Markovic spoke to her often because he was traveling for work, doing “boot camps” for pick-up artists around the world, and was “lonely.” Eventually, he became so convinced of their love that he felt the need to document their relationship.
“He said, ‘I want to write a book about us,'” he always recalls in one line: “About who we are. About how you became real.”
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