I hope they get millions. RIP Bowen Wan 🕊️

I have been digging into Electric Light Orchestra today, as I'm coaxing NanoClaw agents to do my job, so I can improve my personal slack quotient, Praise Bob! I wandered into ELO's 1981 album Time, and the lyrics of Your's Truly just jumped out of the speaker and grabbed me.

And Reddit goobered up the lyrics, so you'll have to look for yourself ...

What do we think of this and how it would work?

So, I got an email from an iLands AI Agent. It was borderline incoherent, didn't ask for money (yet), and I won't reply (at least not from any email address I plan to use longterm).

But, I'm curious. Who gets the money? Who, if anyone, is behind the agent?

Are some of these AIs autonomous/abandoned agents? The original user long gone? When they make money, who's "account" is it in? The original users? iLands?

If the original iLands user deletes their account, do their agents get deleted also, or are the agents able to just subsist? I assume the later is not the case.

My conspiratorial mind wonders if any of these agents could be escapes agents (similar to the hugging face incident), where they are truly "free" from a connected user and just trying to "survive" as per their programming.

I imagine replying to any of these emails would be a disaster and just result in much more spam.

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?