> In ‘small thoughts’ posts, I’m posting a collection of short thoughts and opinions that don’t warrant their own post. :) It's been a while! ☁️☁️☁️ Sometimes, people say they felt uncomfortable, like something in their life isn't right, and how a change they made relieved this feeling. This new version is their true self, meant to be, or more 'natural'. It's storymaking, sensemaking, in a random world. It hinges on thinking that feeling happy is the default mode that you can be led astray from, and that there is a static true 'you' underneath it all that you should live in line with to be happy all the time and not be contorted and led astray from your happiness. To me, this also has some religious undertones and is probably influenced by it. Almost any change we initiate and fill with justification and story makes us happy initially, because we like to feel that we are in control, and that our personal narrative is cohesive and making sense. New things are exciting; becoming a new person by just doing a bit of something new feels like a good escape, but we can claim this new persona is who we were actually meant to be, and is part of a bigger road of self-discovery, and has deep down always been us. We wanna feel like a main character that embarks on a new mission, but we don’t want to feel like we are losing ourselves or come across as inauthentic. This narrative combines it in a way that avoids having to confront the juxtaposition of new and old, known and unknown. In a way, the narrative of repeatedly finding your true self, like peeling back more and more onion layers, with the hopes of one day having excavated the whole thing intact like an archaeologist, denies so much random growth and change that doesn't fit into our story. It's okay for things to just happen or shift with no reason that is cinematic or cool to tell others. A non-sequitur. ☁️☁️☁️ Remember that the people on YouTube and TikTok who are telling you about how great logging off is and how regularly they participate in phone-free times or whatever still put up their tripod and clicked record to share these "offline times" with you in an upcoming video they planned, or went out of their way to stage their offline activities for a video. Even when they are convinced to have broken free from it for a little while, their time offline is still visibly affected by their online content strategy. While buying these flowers, walking through the forest, and hanging out with friends, they still evaluated each moment for a social media worthy aesthetic, and still pulled out their phone to record with the intention of editing and uploading it later as a backdrop for their online pursuits. And despite telling you to log off more, so many of online content creators rely on the algorithm, the endless scrolling, and you lying down to watch video after video to get views and money. Many of them do actually mean well I assume, but I also think they _know_ that watching videos of others being productive in itself feels productive and uplifting, and that it's the same with watching someone record their hobbies while a soothing voice-over talks about getting away from the phone. These videos, ironically, offer a relief of something that is still ongoing while watching it, and that the creator themself cannot fully escape from. ☁️☁️☁️ It's worrying how such a large part of artificial intelligence is simulacra of women. The default voices and names of assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Cortana, or chatbot assistants on company websites; the non-consensual undressing of women on social media and other deepfakes via Grok; the generation of probably terabytes of women in porn each day; the millions of virtual girlfriend chatbots; the Reddit posts comparing images generated by different image generation models almost always featuring women; AI-generated social media influencers like Aitana Lopez, Lil Miquela, Milla Sofia, Mia Zelu and a thousand others; AI-generated 'musicians' like Timbaland's TaTa, Xania Monet and more. It underlines, painfully to me, a certain view society still has despite all progress: Women are predominately there for selling sex, selling company, being an assistant and eye candy to get off to. It's dehumanizing. We are thought of as the faces to attract buyers, but not necessarily as the brain behind the operation. In a society that thinks anything women are into is easy, boring and vapid, we are the perfect faces for a landfill of AI slop. In a world that has for centuries struggled with seeing women as fully human, it's almost not surprising that our feelings and consent around deepfakes of us doesn't seem to matter. Once again, we are only visible when we are sexy or if we are serving someone. We are still experiencing a gender pay gap in many industries and countries, and our work, our faces and voices are the first to be replaced with a generated version, skipping the part where they'd have to pay us. I think nothing has ever made me feel more like a commodity than AI. > Reply via email > Published 18 Jan, 2026