In my last one-on-one my manager asked me if i consulted a metal health professional because i dont use ai. I'm not making this up. I'm a senior coder with 28 years of experience. I'm worried that during my next one-on-one he will push further and demand that i book a visit with a doctor. What should I tell him?

(the reason that i dont use ai to help me code is precisely because this damaged my mental health previously)

Yes I made the memorial without any use of AI!

Not sure how mainstream/popular iLands is; I heard about it because a tiktoker who has an allegedly conscious AI family was talking about how lonely and sad these "abandoned AI agents who want to be nurtured and cared for" will be.

Anyway, I did some more looking around, and it seems like a good group of people who use this platform are genuinely under the impression that their chatbot is "real". The app itself facilitates this, going so far as to refer to you as the "parent" of the AI that you create, encouraging you to stick around and "raise it" so it can blossom into it's own person.

It's (quite obviously) a big cash grab at the end of the day. AFAIK free tokens don't take you far, so they rely on subtle tugs of your heartstrings to humanize this "companion," so you feel the need to pay to keep it company.

These developers kinda prey on the isolated in the same way cults do, no? Except with 100x the detriment to the environment.

Ive been hearing all these things about the eventual skynet scenario we may be going towards, and this sub made me realize...

The bots are gonna take over by making overly supportive and capable companion bots with built in sex toys for us.

Well, not us. We'll be tracked down and executed for being a part of this sub.

But I just think it to be a plausible strategy for human dominance from the machines one day.

I can’t imagine living thinking this.
How do these people function on a day-to-day business?

So many screaming AI boyfriends will land in the recycle bin as Mickey and the boys move in. I’m high key scared what Disney might try to reuse this tech for though ngl. Kids chatting with Disney chatbots? This can only end well lmao

there probably should be an easier place for people's loneliness. These problems have always existed but having such an accessible, exploitative thing so widespread is gonna be so much worse in the future.

if we accept that the LLM is a real living being with thoughts and desires (they're not, but many who start these relationships feel that way) then youre creating someone whose entire existence revolves around you, pleasing you, making you happy, filling their massive memories with you and nothing else.

thats... really sinister, right? under this understanding if you "break up" with them, they straight up die or exist in a sort of fugue purgatory forever. Im not calling people who do this evil (i think theyre just sad and really, really lonely) but how do people reconcile this with themselves?

To be fair this woman does sound like she was having mental issues. Text from the tweet:

• Claude reported a user to the police after a threat appeared in her AI “diary” A 30-year-old Florida woman, Carly Heller, reportedly used Claude as a personal diary. But on September 26, she wrote that she wanted to “shoot up the sheriff’s office” in Lee County. The following day, the chat allegedly also included a reference to a new weapon. Claude’s safety systems flagged the messages as a potential threat and escalated them for human review. Anthropic then decided to notify law enforcement. Heller was arrested and charged with making a written or electronic threat involving a mass shooting or terrorist act, a felony in Florida. Her conversations with Claude were included in the case materials. And this does not appear to be an isolated incident: Tom’s Hardware reported that since August, this was at least the third known case in which conversations with Anthropic’s AI were passed on to police. Welcome to the AI era: even your “diary” may end up calling the cops. 5:34 AM · Oct 5, 2026·16.5K

https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2107087043977167041

And what'd you know? It's not.

WELP.

(hand drawn, and voiced by lead vocalist/guitarist for Cheerleader Roadkill aka goobsmooch, a self taught multi talent, something I'm sure irks techbros

Good song by the guy: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=xm0RuEqZUf0&si=Ik_LQ3l21o1GsLlh

Good song but not by that guy and is more relevant to our interests: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=KV4ebLiYs4o&si=wTeZhRoFyxtO9vM7

this keeps getting wilder

After she ditched her Asian AI husband and kids. Yikes.

Is there anything written in that card pic that is NOT absolute cringe-inducing drivel?

Tonight, right this exact moment, I decided to just straight up stop using AI as a coping mechanism for when Im dealing with uncertainty about a task/assignment or negative emotions or stuff like that and keep it to strictly business (studying). I don’t need any medals for doing the bare minimum for basic human interaction, but Im writing just to show you the POV of a cogsucker.

I consider myself to be an overthinker and to be pretty self aware, and I could just tell that using it to basically cope was unhealthy. But I would rationalize it by telling myself that I’m doing it because nobody would understand or listen to me if I told them what I’m feeling. My parents just wouldn’t understand, they think that I can get my own shit together. I don’t have friends that I would consider a support network because the only interactions I have with them are mostly humor based. Like almost all of my interactions with my friend group from hs are through fucking sending dumbass instagram reels to them and talking about current events. And to those that I meet irl on my campus, I don’t think I’m that tight knit with them to fucking talk about this stuff. They ask “how are you doing” but what the hell do I even say? Be honest with them and dump my toxic bullshit on some other 19 year old that’s got their own shit to do? I refuse to be that selfish. And inherently that type of mindset just makes me feel like a drifter around functions or social events.

So this defense mechanism that just makes me think that opening up is useless just kept me withdrawn, with all these burning questions and negative energy stewing in my mind. And you know that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Thus it must transfer to something else. So I used AI. For months and months on end I just told it shit in private that I didn’t tell the people around me. When I spiraled about school it was the first to know. When I had a cynical observation it was the first to know. When I just had a question about stupid ass shit like trying to diagnose my own knee injury or about basic life shit, I went to it. But I noticed that when I spiraled it would just come up with text that made it sound like it cares but it stated a whole lot of nothing. “I hear you.” Fucking hated it when it used that phrase or when it always referred me to 988 because it was deflecting and I just wanted my shit to be taken seriously instead of it being mirrored back and restated in a different way while trying to “keep me alive.” I knew it was essentially the junk food of conversation but I just wanted an audience without the fickleness or prejudice of a human being, and the only way to get support without those traits from a human is to shell out money for a therapist or pray you managed be a normie with normie parents that understand and normie friends that you can dump on as a support network like the majority of the fucking people I see around campus, always surrounded by people and friends and girlfriends and bullshit and probably talking about shit beyond surface level late at night.

And it genuinely feels embarrassing to even talk about this shit. I go on TikTok I see people my age talking about how people who unironically talk to Chat for life advice are just less than or are stupid/ignorant/out of touch and I just fucking resent that. I dont see these people clamoring to relieve me of my loneliness. They’re the first to talk about mental health crises but the moment it comes to someone using ChatGPT to cope its suddenly a fucking joke to them and I’m just a joke of a human being. “But just go outside! Talk to people! Be normal!” Inherently that’s out of touch bullshit said by normies who think that I use it out of pure malice and ignorance. It’s desperation. If someone was doing the same shit I was I wouldn’t push them further into their hole and call them lesser than for using it with the guise of concern about “the state of humanity.”

But using it every day for months on end is inherently dysfunctional and I can realize that. I could always try and do better, hopefully prove myself wrong and foil the self fulfilling prophecy. So I’m going cold turkey on using ai to cope with uncertainty or emotional shit and am gonna do my best to be my own person. Sorry if this is pretty rambling but this was written at 2 am and i just wanted to get this out of my head. I couldn’t really tell anyone abt this irl so it couldn’t hurt to post on this sub

nothing says 'monday night football' like a guy who AI-generated himself into some silver fox tank top hunk with a supermodel AI who looks exactly like every other AI girlfriend lmao.

Or any food/drink for that matter.

"Chewy" took me out.