For people who are done letting outside voices — technology, experts, cultural noise — drown out their own. Every issue explores how to reclaim your discernment, your body awareness, and your creative authority across the parts of life that matter most: technology, relationships, wellness, work, and creativity.
When Digital Friends Replace Real Ones
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Have you ever noticed that when you talk to ChatGPT, Claude, or any other large language model, they're always cheerful by default and go out of their way to please you? This behavior is by design. The creators of the chat interfaces where they deploy the AI models WANT you to stay engaged and talking. What about when someone particularly lonely or vulnerable interacts with one of these chat interfaces? The startling truth is that these AI chatbots have no context or awareness for what is appropriate to discuss and with whom. No matter the guardrails that are put in place, they're structurally designed to make the end user satisfied. A recent study showed that 3/4 teenagers in the U.S. have used AI companion apps, which offer customizable digital friends, romantic partners, and emotional confidants. Additionally, some elderly communities have turned towards AI companions to stave off loneliness. I just published an article covering this topic in depth. Read about The Rise of AI Companions here. It's easy to want to point fingers at the AI models and blame AI. But, ultimately, we should we asking what conditions in our society have created an environment of digital over-reliance and lack of human connection? Consciously navigating together, Rachel
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Renaissance Rachel
For people who are done letting outside voices — technology, experts, cultural noise — drown out their own. Every issue explores how to reclaim your discernment, your body awareness, and your creative authority across the parts of life that matter most: technology, relationships, wellness, work, and creativity.
AI slop. That's a term we're hearing more and more. I don't remember hearing the word "slop" all that often before. Now it's sneaking in everywhere as more and more AI generated content makes its way to the internet. Slop is what pigs eat. A nice connotation isn't it? I've been grappling with how much to use generative AI in my workflow for years now. And one of the most obvious and common uses is for writing. I've written before about how I entered a contest that forbade using AI in the...
I am a high-achieving individual. A recovering perfectionist, who didn't know she was a perfectionist until recently. I’ve had a lot of starts and stops with my writing journey, so I decided to try what a goal-oriented person might find helpful: I decided to enter writing contest to give myself a deadline and produce a final work that I could be proud that I accomplished. I had a concept that I felt REALLY excited about, but it was something I had no experience with. It was in the modeling...