How do you do, fellow normies? No essay today, but some hella good stories — plus my pencil sketch of the week. Let’s get to it.

They want to talk to somebody. That ‘somebody’ ends up being AI

Although I am extremely fucked in the head, I have not hitherto attempted to use ChatGPT as a therapist. So when news broke of yet another suicide connected to generative AI, I was curious to find out what it’s like to try to rely on a chatbot for mental health support — and how it can go wrong.

The answers? Fascinating and kind of bonkers!

"It's caused me so much trauma talking to AI as much as I did. I honestly think that if I didn't use AI maybe I wouldn't have driven myself to psychosis,” one person told me.

"It's like a magic eightball. You take it with a pinch of salt... it's not a 100 percent replacement for a therapist,” said another, who found it generally helpful (up to a point).

One source even described how they’d become “addicted” to using ChatGPT to help navigate social situations, to the point where they became scared to send messages to friends or crushes without asking the bot first.

Luckily, albeit somewhat eerily, they have strong reason to believe that the human being they were most often chatting with was also doing the same thing all along.

Hang on, I said. So basically it’s like you were both being fed your lines through an earpiece? Like the AIs were kinda just talking to each other through your mouths?

“A little bit,” they said. “Which was creepyyyy!”

Can Elon Musk’s Optimus robots save Tesla?

No.

Okay, fine: maybe. I just wanted to have some fun with Betteridge’s Law. 

Still, robotics experts I interviewed are highly sceptical that Elon Musk’s Optimus robots — clearly designed to correspond maximally to people’s idea of what a sci-fi robot would look like — will be a success.

Let alone whether it can fulfil Musk’s extremely optimistic promises about how many of them Tesla is going to be building by 2027.

The big problem is Musk’s insistence on a humanoid design, rather than a range of more specialised chassis (chassises?) optimised for industrial applications.

"It's not even clear that the humanoid robot race is worth running," explained local venture capitalist (and dare I say friend of the newsletter) Prescott Watson.

The GOP spent years smearing trans people as killers. Now it wants to take their guns

So apparently, the Trump administration is now considering banning trans people, or at least many trans people, from exercising their Second Amendment rights.

Cool. Cool cool cool. Cool cool cool cool cool.

I mean, what can you even say? Obviously, this is a transparent assault on trans people’s ability to participate equally in American life. Also obviously, Republicans have been gunning for this for years as they repeatedly and falsely smeared random mass shooters as actually secretly trans.

This time, of course, the shooter really was trans. But a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I don’t want to get into speculation here, but I think by any measure a policy proposal like this is a bad sign for what the Trump administration hopes to do to trans people in future.

All of which called to mind an interview I did in 2022 with Erin Palette, national coordinator of the queer gun group Pink Pistols. I admit, back then I felt it was a fairly unlikely scenario.

"I am frequently asked if gun ownership is more important to me than queer rights," Palette said. “They're both very important to me, but if I had to pick one, I would pick gun ownership.

"Queer rights are enforced by the government, and if the government suddenly decides that I no longer have those rights, there's nothing I can do about that.

“But if I have a firearm, and I genuinely fear that the government wants to kill me – and I am not advocating for the overthrow of the US government or anything like that – then I've still got a firearm, and I can use that to defend myself and to protect my queer life."

Welcome to the Cool Zone, I guess.

Sketch of the week

Wasn’t that exciting? Let’s finish up by touching some grass and taking some deep breaths together.

In (one, two, three, four)…

…and out (one, two, three, four).

Whoah, hey, are you okay? Do you need me to call an ambulance?

Thanks for reading! As always, you can find me on Bluesky here, on X here, and read my recent stories for The Independent here.