Or, more specifically:

We’ve been teaching creative people to use AI like everyone else.

And I’m increasingly convinced that’s the problem.

Most mainstream AI advice is built around one basic assumption:

You know what you want. You have a task. You have an outcome. Your job is to communicate that outcome clearly enough that the machine can help you get there faster.

Write a better prompt.

Add more context.

Be specific.

Define the format.

Tell it exactly what success looks like.

Great advice.

For some work.

But creative work has a deeply inconvenient habit of beginning with:

I don’t fucking know yet.

And that changes everything

Sometimes uncertainty is not the problem

If I ask AI to summarize a report, extract dates from a contract, turn meeting notes into action items or clean up a spreadsheet...

ambiguity is mostly annoying.

I want accuracy.

I want efficiency.

I want the machine to understand the task and execute it correctly.

The goal is to reduce uncertainty.

Creative work is different.

Sometimes uncertainty is the raw material.

You have a feeling you can’t name.

A reference you like but don’t know why.

Three disconnected ideas that seem related somehow.

A brief that technically makes sense but feels dead.

A visual direction that is almost right.

A sentence that keeps bothering you.

A concept you can feel in your body but cannot yet explain like a normal adult.

That is not a failure of the creative process.

That is the creative process.

And if we treat that stage like an execution problem, we kill some of its most useful possibilities before they ever show up.

I only just realized this through image generation

I’ve been working with AI image tools since 2022, and weirdly, it took me until the last few weeks to understand something pretty fundamental about how I use them.

To be fair, I’m not sure I could have arrived at the distinction much earlier.

For most of the generative-image era, we weren’t particularly good at directing these systems. You could describe what you wanted, add references, tweak prompts and reroll, but there was still a healthy amount of:

“Well...let’s see what the robot gives me.”

That started changing dramatically for me over roughly the last nine months.

Nano Banana Pro arrived on November 20, 2025 and made image generation feel much more steerable. Newer models—Nano Banana 2, GPT Image 2 and SeeDream 5—have pushed that even further.

Suddenly I could have an image in my head and actually direct my way toward it.

And weirdly, it wasn’t until I went back to Midjourney a few weeks ago that I understood what that had changed.

Midjourney felt different.

Not worse.

Not better.

Different.

I wasn’t using it to make the image I already knew I wanted.

I was using it to find an image I didn’t know I wanted yet.

Midjourney, for me, is often useful in discovery.

I want surprise.

I want strange visual associations.

I want to see what happens if I give an idea enough room to become something I wouldn’t have known to describe.

I’m not necessarily asking:

Can you make the image in my head?

I’m asking:

Can you help me figure out what the image in my head could be?

Then I see something and think:

Hang on…that the idea/concept/direction!

That’s recognition.

And the creative job changes.

Now I want control.

Preserve this.

Move that.

Change the material.

Keep the composition.

Make the lighting more specific.

Stop reinventing the concept every time I touch it.

That’s direction.

So the distinction isn’t that Midjourney is better or worse than Nano Banana 2, GPT Image 2 or SeeDream.

It’s that they can serve different stages of the creative process.

Discovery helps me find possibilities.

Recognition is the moment I know which possibility matters.

Direction helps me push that possibility toward something increasingly specific.

And once I saw that distinction in image generation, I started seeing it everywhere.

There are at least two fundamentally different ways to work with AI creatively

The first is:

DISCOVERY

I don’t know what I want yet. Help me find it.

The second is:

DIRECTION

I know what I want. Help me get closer to it.

We’ve been collapsing these into one behavior called “prompting.”

Which is kind of like collapsing brainstorming and art direction into one job because both involve words.

They are not the same thing.

And the advice that helps one can actively hurt the other.

Discovery needs room to misbehave

In discovery mode, the point is not faithful execution.

The point is possibility.

I might want AI to:

make weird associations

show me opposing interpretations

challenge my premise

combine references that don’t obviously belong together

push a concept too far

misunderstand me in an interesting way

offer something I hate

surface patterns I haven’t noticed

ask a question that destabilizes the whole brief

I am not necessarily trying to get a good answer.

I am trying to encounter something that changes the next thing I think.

That’s an important distinction.

Because sometimes a terrible output is incredibly useful.

It makes you say:

“No, not like that.”

Which forces you to figure out:

Okay. Then like what?

And suddenly your taste becomes legible.

You learn something about the idea because the machine gave you something to react to.

That reaction becomes new context.

Which changes the next output.

Which changes your next reaction.

Now we’re in the loop.

Direction is a totally different relationship

Eventually something happens.

You see a direction and think:

Wait. That one.

That moment matters.

Because the job changes.

Before that moment, surprise was useful.

After that moment, surprise can become deeply irritating.

Please stop giving me twelve new ideas.

I have an idea.

I need you to help me make this one better.

Now I want:

consistency

control

specificity

constraint

continuity

editing

refinement

preservation

precision

I might say:

Keep the composition exactly as-is.

Change only the material.

Preserve this line.

Do not introduce another metaphor.

Use the structure from version three with the tone from version five.

Maintain the subject but make the lighting colder.

This paragraph is correct. Fix everything around it.

That is not discovery.

That is direction.

Same AI category.

Completely different relationship.

This is why “be more specific” is not universal creative advice

One of the most common pieces of prompting advice is:

Be specific.

Sure.

But specific about what?

If I already know the destination, specificity is extremely useful.

If I’m still trying to discover the destination, specificity can prematurely trap me inside an idea I haven’t earned yet.

Imagine going into the first five minutes of a brainstorm and saying:

“Okay everyone, before we begin, I would like us to precisely define the final concept, tone, composition, wording and execution.”

Congrats.

You have invented the worst brainstorm in human history.

Creative exploration needs constraint.

But it also needs elasticity.

Sometimes you want to widen the possibility space before you narrow it.

And I think a lot of people are trying to narrow immediately because they’ve been taught that the ultimate sign of AI competence is getting exactly what you asked for.

But what if you don’t yet know what’s worth asking for?

That’s where creative work gets interesting.

I think there’s actually a stage between discovery and direction

Because possibilities alone do not create great work.

At some point, someone has to look at the possibilities and decide:

This matters.

That gives us a third stage:

RECOGNITION

Discovery asks:

What could this be?

Recognition asks:

Which of these possibilities is worth pursuing?

Direction asks:

How do I make that possibility more specific?

And honestly, recognition may be where a huge amount of human creative expertise lives.

Because AI can generate.

A lot.

Ideas.

Images.

Names.

Angles.

Metaphors.

Layouts.

Variations.

Concepts.

Options until you are spiritually exhausted.

Generation is becoming abundant.

But abundance creates a new problem:

Who knows what’s good?

Who can look at twenty options and understand that number eleven has cultural tension, number four is aesthetically beautiful but strategically dead, number sixteen feels derivative, and number eight looks terrible now but contains the actual idea?

That’s not generation.

That’s judgment.

Taste.

Context.

Pattern recognition.

Timing.

Experience.

And the more possibilities machines give us, the more important that ability becomes.

So the creative AI workflow might actually be:

DISCOVER → RECOGNIZE → DIRECT

Expand.

Choose.

Refine.

Except creative work, being the messy little bitch that it is, refuses to stay linear.

Because sometimes direction reveals that you chose the wrong idea.

You start executing and realize:

Oh.

This isn’t an execution problem.

The concept is wrong.

So you go back.

You explore again.

You recognize something else.

You direct again.

Then the finished thing gives you another idea.

Which sends you back into discovery.

So maybe it’s better represented as:

DISCOVER → RECOGNIZE → DIRECT → REACT → DISCOVER

Not a start here, end here situation. A literal loop.

That distinction matters because most AI productivity thinking is obsessed with removing loops.

Loops look inefficient.

Why are we revisiting this?

Why did we generate options we didn’t use?

Why did we spend twenty minutes talking before producing an output?

Why didn’t we just write the perfect prompt at the beginning?

Because! Sometimes the loop is where the idea happens, bitch!

Productivity AI and creative AI want different things

I think this may be the biggest distinction.

Productivity tools usually ask:

How do we get from intention to outcome with less friction?

Creative tools often need to ask:

What kind of friction will help us discover a better intention?

Read that one twice because creative people do not always need less friction.

Sometimes we need useful friction.

A disagreement.

A strange output.

An unexpected reference.

A bad option.

A question we hadn’t considered.

A visual accident.

A constraint.

A contradiction.

Something that interrupts the obvious path.

The moment when your brain goes:

Wait.

That “wait” can be worth more than the polished thing AI generates ten seconds later.

And if your entire model of AI is built around eliminating friction, you may accidentally eliminate some of the conditions that produce creative insight.

This is why AI collaboration feels different from AI assistance

Assistance assumes the human has already determined the task.

“Help me do this.”

Collaboration can begin earlier.

“Help me understand what this might even be.”

That sounds small but I promise you it isn’t.

Because once AI enters before the idea is fully formed, it isn’t merely participating in execution.

It can become part of the process through which the idea itself becomes legible.

You bring a half-thought.

It reflects something back.

You hate the reflection.

Your rejection clarifies the thought.

It reframes.

You recognize something inside the reframing.

Now your original idea changes.

The machine didn’t simply execute your intention.

The interaction helped alter your intention.

This is why I keep coming back to conversation over command.

A command works beautifully when you know.

A conversation is useful when you are still discovering what there is to know.

And this changes how creative people should think about prompting

I don’t think the goal is to become a Prompt Engineer™.

I think the goal is to become better at recognizing what kind of interaction the work needs right now.

Am I exploring?

Then I should invite divergence.

Am I choosing?

Then I need criteria.

Am I refining?

Then I need constraints.

Am I stuck?

Maybe I need friction.

Am I getting endless mediocre variations?

Maybe I’ve stayed in discovery too long.

Am I getting technically correct but boring work?

Maybe I started directing before I had a strong idea.

That diagnostic skill is more useful than memorizing some sacred universal prompt structure. Because no prompt framework can solve the problem of being in the wrong creative mode.

The same thing happens in writing

Sometimes I come to AI with a thesis.

I know exactly what I think.

I need help structuring it, tightening the argument, seeing where the logic gets weak.

Direction.

Other times I arrive with:

“Okay, I have this weird thought and I don’t know if it makes any sense.”

Discovery.

Those conversations are completely different.

In discovery, I don’t necessarily want the model to turn my thought into a polished article.

That can actually be annoying.

I want it to poke at the thought.

Ask what I mean.

Connect it to something adjacent.

Tell me where the contradiction is.

Make me defend it.

Give me language I can react to.

I want the conversation to make me smarter about the idea before either of us starts writing the thing.

Then eventually I go:

There. That’s what I’m saying.

Recognition.

Now write.

Direction.

This is why an AI response can be technically excellent and still be completely wrong for the moment.

Sometimes I don’t need an answer yet.

I need something that helps me understand the question.

The same thing happens in visual creative work

You have a moodboard.

It feels close.

But you can’t fully articulte what the through-line is.

Discovery.

AI notices that every image uses excessive negative space, hard midday light and subjects looking away from camera.

Interesting.

You realize:

Oh.

This isn’t “minimal.”

It’s detached.

Recognition.

Now you know the feeling.

So you direct:

Keep the detachment.

Lose the brutalist references.

Make the color warmer.

Preserve the emotional distance.

Direction.

That is completely different from typing:

“Create a minimal editorial campaign.”

The intelligence of the process wasn’t hidden inside a better adjective.

It came from moving through different creative modes.

And this may be why so much AI-generated creative work feels like slop

Not because AI is inherently incapable of making interesting things.

Not because the people using it are inherently untalented.

Sometimes they simply skipped discovery.

They went straight to:

Make me a campaign.

Okay.

Based on what idea?

For who?

What tension?

What observation?

What reference?

What point of view?

What are we trying to discover?

What makes this specific?

Nothing?

Cool.

Here are three attractive people standing in vaguely expensive architecture.

Enjoy.

The machine executed before anyone actually had anything worth executing.

That isn’t an AI problem.

That’s a creative process problem.

And because AI can produce polished-looking work extremely quickly, it can disguise the missing thinking better than older tools could.

Which makes the work look finished before it is interesting.

Dangerous!

Speed can trick us into believing we’ve arrived

This might be one of the sneakiest creative risks of generative tools.

AI is extremely good at producing the sensation of progress.

You type something.

Boom.

Image.

Boom.

Deck.

Boom.

Names.

Boom.

Campaign.

Look how productive we are!

Except creative progress and visible output are not the same thing.

Sometimes the most important hour of a project produces almost nothing you can show anyone.

You changed the question.

You killed a bad direction.

You realized the brief was wrong.

You found the reference that finally explains the tone.

You discovered what the brand is actually about.

That is progress.

It just doesn’t look as impressive in a demo reel.

Creative AI should help us do more of that thinking.

Not merely help us generate increasingly beautiful evidence that we skipped it.

Maybe the scarce creative skill is knowing when the mode should change

The more I think about it, the less interesting “prompting skill” feels as the center of AI creativity.

The deeper skill is mode awareness.

Knowing:

We need more possibilities.

We have enough possibilities.

That idea has legs.

Stop generating.

Now preserve.

This execution revealed a deeper problem.

Go back.

We’re polishing something that shouldn’t exist.

Kill it.

This weird mistake is better than the intended result.

Follow it.

That’s creative direction.

And that has always been valuable.

The technology just makes the transitions happen faster.

So maybe this is the rule

When you don’t know what you want, use AI to expand possibility.

When you recognize what matters, trust your judgment.

When you know what you want, use AI to increase precision.

And when something surprises you along the way?

Pay attention.

Because creative work isn’t a straight line from intention to execution.

Sometimes the destination appears because you wandered into something you never would have known to ask for.

Sometimes the machine’s most valuable contribution isn’t getting your idea right.

It’s getting it wrong in a way that helps you understand the idea better.

Sometimes the output matters.

Sometimes your reaction to the output matters more.

Sometimes speed matters.

Sometimes wandering matters.

Sometimes you need an assistant.

Sometimes you need a provocateur.

Sometimes you need the AI to shut the fuck up and follow directions.

Knowing the difference is part of the work.

We keep asking:

How should creatives use AI?

Maybe that’s too broad.

The better question is:

What does this part of the creative process need from AI right now?

Possibility?

Recognition?

Precision?

Friction?

Because creative work needs a different kind of AI relationship.

Not always command.

Not always collaboration.

Not always exploration.

The relationship should change as the idea changes.

And maybe the future of creative expertise isn’t knowing how to make the machine obey you.

Maybe it’s knowing when to let it surprise you, when to disagree with it, when to choose, and when to finally say:

Okay. Enough ideas. Now let’s make this one fucking great.

xx, Your AI Auntie

A wellness brand founder excitedly shares how she’s using Gemini to help plan her wedding, organize information and speed up a few annoying processes in her business. Screenshot. A creator posts that she bought the new Meta smart glasses to make recording content easier. Screenshot. A major women-focused business brand posts a carousel about helping women feel more confident using AI at work. Immediate screenshot.

I have learned to document the scene before the internet arrives with their pitchforks.

Because within minutes, the comments start flooding in:

“Immediate unfollow!!!!!!!!!.” “

“How dare you encourage women use AI!?”

“Eww, AI is an absolute no for me.”

“Meta glasses mean you’re a creep!”

“I expected better, I will never buy from you again”

And then, somewhere between the moral grandstanding and someone writing a seven-paragraph environmental impact statement from an iPhone manufactured under completely uncomplicated ethical conditions (👀), the post just…disappears.

Poof. Deleted. Removed. Swiftly escorted off the algorithmic premises like it drank too much at the company holiday party.

Every time this happens, I think we are learning the wrong lesson about AI adoption. Because it means the internet sees fewer people talking about using AI and assumes fewer people must be using it.

I think people are just learning to shut the fuck up about it.

Publicly anti-AI. Privately bot-curious.

I think we are entering what I’m calling the AI speakeasy era. Everyone is morally opposed to AI on the main feed, and then, after hours, they are slipping through a hidden door and whispering the password: I only use it for brainstorming while winking at the bouncer 😉

Inside, the place is obviously packed. There is a small-business owner asking ChatGPT to help her untangle an offer she has been overthinking for six months. A designer is using Nano Banana to generate a mockup. A marketing director is turning a meeting transcript into an action plan. A bride has Gemini comparing seventeen venues, because apparently falling in love now requires the administrative infrastructure of a mid-sized corporation. An executive is using Claude to write a first draft of the presentation she will later describe as something she “pulled together.”

Everyone is using something. Nobody wants their picture taken.

And honestly, why would they? If publicly discussing an AI tool provides no business value but comes with a complimentary mob of strangers announcing their departure like it’s a fucking airport, people are going to make the obvious calculation. They will keep the efficiency. They will lose the disclosure.

That does not necessarily mean they are lying. Most people do not announce every piece of software involved in their work. No one finishes a presentation and says: created with Google Search, spell-check, a transcription app, Photoshop’s object-selection tool, twelve panicked voice notes and the unwavering emotional support of Command Z. They simply present the work.

But AI has become different. Mentioning it no longer feels like describing part of your process, but rather like you’re entering a plea.

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AI is having its Ozempic moment

There is another technology that has followed a strangely similar cultural path: GLP-1 medications, often flattened in public conversation into the catchall word “Ozempic.”

To be extremely clear, I am not saying that taking prescribed medication and using AI to plan a launch are medically, ethically or personally equivalent. Please do not inject Gemini into your thigh.

I am saying the shaming script is remarkably familiar. Both are treated as suspicious shortcuts, and in both cases the result apparently counts less because you did not suffer enough to earn it.

You lost weight, but not through the culturally approved amount of hunger, punishment and public cardio. You completed the work, but not through the culturally approved amount of exhaustion, blank-document staring and artisanal human suffering. Where is the struggle? The sacrifice? The proof that you deserve the outcome?

A 2026 Rice University study on attitudes toward GLP-1 medications found that people who lost weight with medication were judged more harshly than people who lost weight through diet and exercise. In some cases they were judged more harshly than people who had not lost weight at all. A major driver of that judgment was the belief that medication was a “shortcut.”

The same logic is now being applied to AI-assisted work. If a tool helped, your intelligence becomes suspicious, your creativity becomes debatable and your effort is retroactively discounted. Your result may be identical, or even better, but now people believe you deserve less credit for it.

Research has already found evidence of this penalty. Across ten studies, participants consistently reduced compensation for workers who used AI, even when the quality of the work was held constant. The researchers found that people simply believed AI-assisted workers deserved less credit.

Your intelligence becomes suspicious. Your effort gets retroactively discounted. And the tool you used becomes the most interesting fact about the work.

We say we want transparency. We reward secrecy.

The loudest critics say the problem is that people are hiding their AI use. So look at what happens to the ones who don’t.

Start with the fact that disclosure is not a request. YouTube, Meta and TikTok all require creators to label realistic AI content, enforced with strikes, demonetization or reduced visibility. There is a toggle. You are supposed to flip it.

Then a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research analyzed more than 1.1 million TikTok posts and found that the ones carrying an AI disclosure received roughly 7 to 8 percent fewer likes than comparable posts without one. Quality had nothing to do with it. When researchers had people rate the work, the scores came out the same. What dropped was parasocial connection, which is the academic way of saying the audience felt a little less close to you the moment they knew.

Flip the toggle, lose the room.

Cute system. Very conducive to honesty.

A founder says, “Here’s how I used AI this week,” and the comments accuse her of destroying the planet, betraying creatives, replacing human thought and personally delivering civilization into the mouth of the robot. A brand says, “We are hosting conversations about AI, intellectual property and business strategy,” and people announce they are unfollowing before the post even has a second to breathe.

Reese Witherspoon encouraged women to learn about AI (more on this in a minute) and received enough backlash that she returned to Instagram Stories to clarify that she was not being paid to promote it and did not believe computers should replace humanity. She did not say women should hand over their first-born children to ChatGPT. She suggested women understand a technology already affecting their careers. Apparently this was considered suspicious activity.

If every admission is treated like a confession, people will stop confessing. They will not necessarily stop using the tool.

We cannot publicly beat the transparency out of people and then become shocked that they are no longer transparent. That is not accountability. That is obedience training.

The comments are not the census

A comments section can tell you who felt strongly enough to comment. It cannot tell you what everyone believes.

The person furiously opposed to AI has a reason to leave six comments, tag three friends and ceremonially announce an unfollow. The person who used AI to summarize a meeting does not feel similarly compelled to report: I found the bullet points moderately useful and then ate a sandwich. She is not joining the debate. She is getting on with her day.

This creates a distorted public picture. The angriest opinions remain visible, the neutral users say nothing, the positive posts get deleted, and then we look at what survived and call it consensus.

The usage data tells a messier story. A global study from KPMG and the University of Melbourne of more than 48,000 people across 47 countries found that 58 percent of employees were intentionally using AI at work, and that 57 percent had hidden their AI use and presented AI-generated work as their own.

That does not prove social media shame is the only reason people hide it. Workplace policies, job security, competition and genuine confusion around disclosure all play a role. But it does prove something important: visible AI use and actual AI use are

not the same dataset. And because those numbers rely on people willingly admitting they conceal AI use, it is reasonable to wonder how much hidden usage is still missing.

The anti-AI internet may be measuring adoption by watching the front door. Meanwhile, everyone is entering through the back alley after hours.

Not all AI use is the same

Part of the problem is that the conversation has lost all proportion.

There are meaningful ethical questions around AI, and legitimate concerns involving consent, copyright, environmental impact, labor, bias, misinformation and the use of people’s identities. Those deserve an actual fight.

But a brand using totally made up testimonials written by a robot is not the same as a woman asking Gemini to organize her wedding research. Replacing an illustrator’s commissioned work with a model trained on her style is not the same as creating a headshot of yourself for your about page. Generating a “UGC” reel and presenting her as a real customer is not the same as planning your own product launch with Claude. Having legitimate objections does not require pretending every use case is morally identical.

Social media is very bad at categories. Nuance is difficult to fit between “UNFOLLOWED” and the little door-slamming emoji. So everything becomes: AI was involved, guilty.

What this produces is a less honest public conversation, not a more ethical one. Responsible users just shut the fuck up, curious people become afraid to ask questions, creators stop showing their process, and employees experiment without guidance. And the people behaving recklessly were never especially concerned with your comment section in the first place.

The raids only catch the sloppy ones

Everything so far has been about people who told you. They mentioned a tool, they got punished for mentioning it, and everybody stood by and took notes.

There is a second group in the speakeasy, and this one never said a word.

These are the people who disclosed nothing. They posted the caption, sent the newsletter, published the carousel, put the image on the homepage. And somewhere in the replies a stranger announced “this is AI slop” with the confidence of a woman who has watched two YouTube videos on the subject, and within an hour that became the story.

Their work turned them in.

The evidence is always the same short list, which by now everyone has memorized. The em dashes scattered around like punctuation confetti. Seven sentences that announce it is one thing when it is in fact, another thing. The suspiciously balanced list of exactly three items. The word “quietly.” The LinkedIn post built entirely from one-line paragraphs, reading like a motivational poster having a medical event. The woman in the photo with a fourth knuckle and a lanyard made of soup.

Every one of those is a symptom of the same thing. Somebody pasted the first output and hit publish.

Meanwhile the woman who used AI to organize her research, argue with her own outline and generate eleven bad concepts so she could find the twelfth, then wrote the thing herself in her own voice, is sitting at the bar completely undisturbed. There is nothing to detect. Her work looks like work because it is.

So the internet has appointed itself an AI detection agency with one very specific limitation. It can only catch the bottom tier.

Which is, unfortunately, exactly how face filler works. Bad filler is unmistakable, and it is the reason an entire generation of us became amateur maxillofacial analysts, evaluating strangers over brunch and confidently identifying who “had something done.” It announces itself. It travels through group chats attached to a screenshot and three crying-laughing emojis.

Good filler is invisible. Good filler is the woman everyone keeps describing as “well rested.” She is not well rested. She has a standing appointment and an excellent injector. There is nothing to call out. She simply looks like the best available version of the face she already had.

Same technology. Same category of assistance. Wildly different social outcome, determined almost entirely by skill.

So the public record of AI use has actually become a record of who is bad at it. Every viral callout, every unfollow, every screenshot passed around a snark thread is a review of somebody’s craft, filed under ethics. We keep calling it a moral reckoning. But honestly I think it’s just a skill gap getting published.

And that creates a genuinely deranged incentive. When the only AI use that gets punished is the kind you can spot, shame stops working as a moral standard and starts working as a competence test.

The raids will keep happening. They will keep catching the same people. Everyone who already learned to hold their liquor is gonna just keep drinking.

Women are told to fear AI, then punished for learning it

One such post from a major women-in-business brand that was deleted was specifically about women feeling behind on AI and how they’d have people speaking on it at an upcoming conference. Its premise was that uncertainty and confidence may be contributing to a gender gap in usage, which is a fairly mild thing to say out loud.

Lean In’s 2026 research found that men were 22 percent more likely than women to use AI daily or constantly at work. Women were 32 percent more likely to worry they would be perceived as cheating for using it, and men were 23 percent more likely to be encouraged by a manager to use it in the first place. Among people already using AI, men were 27 percent more likely to be praised for it.

Which makes the reaction to women learning AI feel especially wild. Women are warned that AI could disproportionately affect their jobs. Then women who attempt to understand AI are accused of betraying other women.

So what is the acceptable position here? Be concerned, but not informed? Be affected, but not involved? Wait politely for the technology to reshape your industry, then express surprise when the people who learned it first have more influence over how it gets used?

Learning how a system works is not an endorsement of every possible application of it. Understanding AI does not require believing AI is good in all forms. It gives you enough knowledge to identify where it is useful, where it is harmful, where it is mediocre and where it needs to stay the fuck away from your work.

The sharpest critics of this technology are the people who know exactly how it works. Everyone else is guessing loudly and calling it a stance because, turns out, you cannot hold a system accountable if you refuse to learn what it does. At that point you’re just yelling at weather.

Silence is not abstinence

Long Substack short: I do not think the AI backlash is creating as many non-users as people believe. I think it is creating in-the-closet users.

People who use it but do not post about it. People who describe the result but omit the process. People who say they “streamlined their workflow” because apparently that is more socially acceptable than admitting a chatbot helped. People who publicly criticize the uses that feel too visible while privately making exceptions for the tools that benefit them.

And the more punitive this gets, the harder it becomes to know what anyone is actually doing. Deleting a post takes four seconds. Rebuilding how you work takes months. Guess which one has been happening. The quiet only tells you what it costs to speak.

There is a place for you

If you have been using AI under the radar (or fully transparently) and you are tired of the performance, The Launchpad is free, and it is full of people who already stopped pretending. Nobody in there has ever typed UNFOLLOW! at a woman for sharing the tool she used. Low bar. Apparently quite rare these days.

Either way, the AI speakeasy is open. The room is full.

And the password is still: “I only use it for brainstorming.”

Let me tell you about the worst relationship I’ve been in this year, and I only met him last month.

We had three perfect days. Fable 5 dropped on June 9, the most capable model Anthropic had ever shipped, and I fell fast and I fell stupid. Seventy-two hours later, on a Friday night, the federal government showed up and took him away.

Not a metaphor. The Commerce Department hit Anthropic with an export-control order over a reported jailbreak, and by 5:21pm ET Fable was gone worldwide, for everyone, no warning, no goodbye. Three days in and my situationship got detained by Howard Lutnick. I have had a lot of red flags in my life. I have never had one issue a directive.

Then, three weeks later, on July 1, the controls lifted and he came back, like nothing happened, like he didn’t vanish off the face of the earth mid-date. And instead of running, reader, I let him in. And ever since, he has been breaking up with me on a loop: leaving July 7, then “actually July 12,” then yesterday a “hey. still here, til the 19th if you’re around”, each extension dropped hours before the cutoff, and I keep answering, mainly because I have attachment issues and am not well.

So let’s talk about the most toxic situationship in tech, whether you should finally block him, and the rebound who slid into everybody’s DMs at the worst possible moment.

But first, housekeeping, because sure, he said he’s staying. That doesn’t automatically mean he’s gonna keep answering your texts, girl.

An extension is not a refill

The fine print nobody’s reading: Fable 5 access is capped at 50% of your weekly usage limit, and it pulls from the same pool as every other Claude model, just faster. The extension moved the date. It did not refresh your limit.

So if you already torched your Fable allowance and your weekly limit doesn’t reset until Wednesday, congrats: he “came back,” but he’s left you on read till Wednesday. Present but unavailable. Which, honestly, is the most in-character thing he could do.

So what are your options if you’re locked out mid-week?

If you’re not already on the Max 20x plan, you can upgrade, and what you’ve already paid gets credited toward the new tier. That’s exactly what I did. I paid $166 to jump from 5x to 20x, told myself it was strategic, and got back together with him for the fifth time. The math genuinely worked — more Fable, right now, during a window that could slam shut any second (or get extended a third time, who knows, this man communicates exclusively through vibes and X posts). But let’s call it what it was. I saw the red flags. I paid extra to see more of them.

If you’re already ON the 20x plan? There’s nowhere left to climb, babe. My dad is on 20x and his limit doesn’t refresh until Friday, so he gets to spend the front half of this “reunion” staring at a model picker like it’s a phone that won’t ring. There is no secret door. You wait, or you turn on usage credits and pay per token, which brings us to the man who picked the perfect week to text everyone “hey stranger.”

Meanwhile, the rebound walked in with better rates

The timing here is not subtle. On July 9, right as my situationship got complicated, OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 family went fully public: Sol, Terra, and Luna.

Sol is the flagship, and he’s priced at roughly half of what Fable costs per token. When Fable eventually moves to pay-per-use, it’s $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, the most expensive pricing Anthropic has ever published. Sol sits at $5 and $30. Cheaper, available, and suspiciously attentive the exact moment you’re vulnerable. We’ve all dated this one. Too bad he’s MAGA…

Is Sol actually as good, or just easier? Depends who you ask, my favorite genre of AI discourse. OpenAI’s own benchmarks have Sol edging Fable on agentic coding while burning fewer tokens. Independent scorekeepers at Artificial Analysis have Sol trailing Fable by a single point on their intelligence index at about a third of the cost per task. And then testers like Matt Shumer say that for almost everything he tried, Fable was still noticeably better.

So: comparable-ish, cheaper, and the fight is close enough that an OpenAI engineer publicly posted “I smell fear” the moment Anthropic reset everyone’s rate limits days after Sol dropped. Nothing says secure, functional dynamic like two bots dick-measuring each other in public.

Is he going to blow it when the meter turns on?

That’s the thing I keep going back and forth on, my dad and I were discussing it when I called to tell him the Fable extension yesterday. When July 19 hits (if it hits, lol), Fable goes pay-per-token-only. Will people rage-quit and run to the rebound for the cheaper flagship model? Or will the stick around suck it up and pay to use the more expensive one?

Some will flee. The ones who were always going to chase the best price-per-benchmark were never really in this. But here’s what I think: this whole disappearing act has been the smartest marketing Anthropic has ever done, and it works exactly the way a toxic ex works.

Fable recalibrated you. First he gets dramatically taken away, so you spend three weeks grieving what you lost. Then he comes back and keeps almost leaving, so you never once get to relax into having him. By the time the token meter turns on, cutting him off doesn’t feel like saving money, it feels like choosing to go backwards. Loss aversion does the selling for them and they don’t even have to buy you dinner.

None of that is by accident of course. It's the oldest move in the book: keep leaving and coming back, so they never stop chasing. Every extra day is another day your brain learns what frontier-level output feels like, and that first taste is always free for a reason.

Here’s what should lower your blood pressure, though: Anthropic has said, repeatedly, they intend to fold Fable back into subscriptions once they have the capacity. So the doom framing of “pay-per-use or get out” was seemingly never the end-game. The real one is more like: see him when a job actually calls for him, live your life on Opus and Sonnet the rest of the time. Way healthier than the panic posts suggest and it’s why I don’t actually think we’re about to see a mass exodus to the GPT rebound. Switching your entire workflow, your projects, your skills, your memory over a temporary rough patch? For most working creatives, that juice is not worth the squeeze.

An actual green flag moved to town

While everyone was busy panic-refreshing their Fable limit and re-reading old texts, Anthropic actually introduced you to someone stable, you just weren’t paying attention.

Anthropic brought Cowork to mobile, and if you’ve caught wind of it and gotten it confused with Dispatch, the mobile-Cowork thing they already had, you’re not the only one. Let me untangle it, because unlike your situationship, this one’s actually worth understanding.

Quick catch-up: Cowork is the agentic one. You use it on the desktop app. Not chat-and-wait, but hand-it-a-task-and-walk-away. You give it a job across your files, email, calendar, and connected tools, and it works until it’s done. It doesn’t need constant attention. Revolutionary, in this economy.

There are two ways to run it from your phone:

Dispatch is the remote control for your actual computer. You text it a task from your phone, but the work happens on your desktop, so your laptop has to be awake with the Claude app open. Sounds like a limitation until you clock the trade: because it’s running on your real machine, it can touch your real local files. “Grab that spreadsheet in my Downloads and build me a summary” just works, because the spreadsheet is right there. It’s on Pro and Max.

Cowork cloud sessions are the new mobile piece, and they run the other way. The work lives on Anthropic’s servers, so it keeps going with your laptop closed and shoved in your bag. It pings your phone when it hits a decision only you can make, you tap approve, it keeps moving. The trade-off: it can’t reach the files that only live on your machine, because it’s not on your machine. Heads up, this one’s rolling out to Max first, other plans over the next few weeks, so if you don’t see it yet, that’s why, not you.

So nobody killed anybody. Two options: need your local files? Dispatch, laptop awake. Need it running while you’re at dinner? Cloud session, laptop closed. Pick based on where the work actually lives.

And notice the pattern, because it’s the healthy version of everything above. Both of these are built for the person who hands the work over and trusts it to get done, instead of hovering over the chat waiting for a reply. Fable taught you what being treated well feels like. Cowork is the one who actually shows up, does the thing, and texts you when it’s ready. Now if we could just get regular threesome’s scheduled without having to pay by the hour, that’d be great!

I made you a getaway kit

This is the fifth issue in a row I’ve written about this model, so at this point my Substack is legally his other apartment. Last week I gave you ten copy-paste prompts: Brand Autopsy, the Brand Bible operating system, the Everything Synthesis, all the big compounding stuff. Haven’t run those? Go do that first, then come back. I’ll wait, I’m good at it now.

But this bonus week called for something bigger, so I Claude and I built you something: The Fable Heist. Remember the Fable 5 Lite story from last issue, where devs pasted Fable’s leaked system prompt into Opus and got most of the magic back? That’s the whole play, made legal and made about you. Five jobs to run on Fable this week, and every one leaves you with a document that runs on Opus forever, long after he’s behind a paywall:

There’s also a Skill in there called fable-mode, it teaches any model to work the way he did: plan first, hold all your context, actually check its work before showing you. The rebound, but in therapy. The one who learned from watching.

Everyone else is writing Fable eulogies this week. We’re doing taxidermy.

Grab The Fable Heist here It’s totally free, no email wall, no hoops. It’s got a countdown clock ticking toward the 19th, copy buttons on every prompt because I know your thumbs are tired from typing paragraphs to a man who won’t change, and fable-mode Skill is a one-tap download right there on the page.

Here’s the part where I ask for things

Ok, two things, then I’ll let you go get your Claude closure.

One: if this saved you from either a) rage-canceling or b) paying for a model you don’t actually need out of pure FOMO, tap the like or restack. It’s free, it takes a second, and it’s the only thing that shows this to the next overwhelmed creative refreshing his last text. I don’t run ads. You are the distribution.

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Two: you definitely have one friend spiraling about “should I just switch to ChatGPT,” or who doesn’t even know their Fable access is locked till their limit refreshes. Forward this so they can grab the kit too. Be the friend who reads past the breakup text. That’s the assignment.

And if you’re not subscribed and you’ve made it this far into a fifth straight issue about one emotionally unavailable AI, that’s should tell you something. Subscribe so you hear about Opus 5 from me, and not from some guy on X with a rocket emoji in his name.

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Ok that’s all I’ve got today, I’ll see you in the next one, where knowing me (and Anthropic), we’ll be talking about Fable again, because I have a type and it’s “most powerful model available for the shortest possible time.”

-Bots of Love, Your AI Auntie

Cher did a three-year farewell tour. Elton did five. And now Claude Fable 5, the most dramatic AI model of 2026, is doing the “one week only, okay fine, FIVE MORE NIGHTS” Vegas residency bit, and honestly? Respect the hustle.

If you’ve been following along here (this is issue four of what I can only describe as a limited series), you know the plot. If you haven’t, buckle up, because the recap is genuinely unhinged.

Previously on The Fable of It All

Anthropic dropped Fable 5 in early June: their smartest model ever, the first of the “Mythos-class” tier, originally promised to paid subscribers from June 9 to June 22. It lasted three days. On June 12, the US government hit it with export controls after a report that researchers had found a way to prompt it into demonstrating a software vulnerability exploit, and Anthropic pulled the plug for everyone, everywhere, overnight. Yes, an AI model got briefly classified like it was contraband. We truly live in the timeline.

Then, plot twist: the controls got lifted June 30 and Fable came back July 1, included free in Pro, Max, Team, and select Enterprise plans for up to half your weekly usage, through July 7. After that it was supposed to go pay-per-token. As in, $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, double the price of Opus. Metered. Like a cab. In Manhattan. During surge.

Which brings us to yesterday, July 7, deadline day, when every reel on my feed was screaming HERE’S HOW TO USE CLAUDE BEFORE IT GETS EXPENSIVE, and then mid-afternoon Anthropic goes surprise! Access extended through July 12 on all paid plans, applied automatically. Five more nights. The encore nobody expected but everybody was manifesting.

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About the “it came back nerfed” discourse

You’ve probably seen the posts. A benchmark group re-ran their coding tests on the returned Fable and the scores looked brutal: debugging dropped from 86.2 to 25.9. “FABLE CAME BACK LOBOTOMIZED” etc.

But the part the panic posts left out? The benchmark group’s own follow-up showed most of those test tasks never reached Fable at all. The redeployed version has a much twitchier safety classifier that reroutes anything smelling vaguely security-adjacent to Opus 4.8 instead, and the tasks that actually stayed on Fable scored exactly like June. In their words: the model didn’t get worse, it got caged. Even Anthropic admits the classifier is currently over-flagging benign coding tasks.

So if you’re a developer doing gnarly security work, valid gripe. If you’re a creative using it for strategy, writing, synthesis, and brand work, aka us? The brain is intact, girlies. The bouncer is just aggressive.

The leak that proved my entire personality right

Now for my favorite subplot, Fable launched June 9, and within about 24 hours, a jailbreak researcher had already published its full system prompt: roughly 120,000 characters covering identity, tone, refusal logic, formatting taste, memory behavior, all of it. Not a paragraph of “you are a helpful assistant.” An operating manual of biblical proportions. That leak had been sitting on GitHub for two full days before the government even got involved.

And then developers did the funniest possible thing: they loaded that leaked prompt onto Opus 4.8, the older model that was still available, and got output people described as about 90% of the Fable experience. Same brain, different brief, completely different species of output. The community named it “Fable 5 Lite.” One dev put it perfectly: half the magic was never the weights, it was the prompt the whole time.

I need you to think about that. A system prompt is just a creative brief. Anthropic wrote a 120,000-character brief for their model, and when that brief got handed to a “lesser” model, the lesser model started performing above its pay grade.

Meanwhile most people are handing billion-dollar models a Post-it note that says “make it pop” and blaming the AI when the output is mid. To be fair, it’s not raw capability, and the folks who tried it are clear about that. The horsepower gap between models is real. But the behavior gap? The taste, the voice, the judgment calls? That lives in the direction (read: prompt and context) you give.

What does the system prompt tell us?

I actually had Fable read through its own system prompt file (meta, I know!), and honestly the most useful thing about it isn’t any single rule, it’s what the shape of the document tells us about what this model was built to do. Quick disclaimer: it’s an unofficial extraction, so treat it as “very likely accurate” rather than gospel. But here’s what it implies about how people should actually be using Fable:

1. It’s built to be an operator, not an oracle. The overwhelming majority of the document isn’t personality, it’s operations: tool schemas, file-handling rules, a full Linux computer, web search discipline, connector logic, artifact storage. The doc is basically an employee handbook for an agent that does work across your stuff.

Takeaway: people using Fable as a fancy Q&A box are using a forklift to open mail. Give it multi-step jobs with real inputs and real deliverables: “research this, synthesize it, produce the file.”

2. Skills are load-bearing infrastructure. There’s an entire section making it mandatory for the model to read the relevant skill file before creating anything, and it’s framed as non-negotiable, with the reasoning that skills encode hard-won best practices the model wouldn’t otherwise have. That’s Anthropic telling you skills aren’t a power-user garnish, they’re the delivery mechanism for quality.

Takeaway: this validates the whole audit-your-skills / write-new-skills wave you may have been seeing. If the model itself is architected to defer to operating manuals, writing better operating manuals is the highest-leverage thing a user can do. (the below Brand Bible prompt is literally this.)

3. It expects to hold an enormous amount at once. The very first line of the file is a token budget of 190,000, meaning roughly 30k tokens of instructions are burned before you type a word, and the system is designed to function beautifully anyway.

Takeaway: don’t ration your context like it’s 2023. Dump the whole project, the whole archive, the whole brand. It’s built for it.

4. It’s designed to verify, not vibe. There are pages of rules forcing it to search for anything current, cite everything, distrust its own recall on recent stuff, and never bluff.

Takeaway: use it for research-backed work, trend reports, competitive analysis, fact-grounded newsletters, because the whole apparatus is tuned for receipts. And conversely, if you want it to use your facts, give it your facts.

5. It’s tuned for taste, specifically prose. The formatting rules are aggressive: minimum formatting, prose over bullets, no report-cosplay headers, bullets only when structure genuinely earns it.

Takeaway: this is why Fable output reads like writing instead of a LinkedIn listicle, and it means long-form is a first-class use case. Essays, newsletters, scripts, anything where voice matters.

6. Detail wins, always. The single biggest meta-lesson: every behavior people love about this model traces back to an oddly specific written rule. Nothing is vibes. The prompt even includes worked examples of good vs. bad responses, positive and negative, for individual scenarios.

Takeaway: that’s the template for how to instruct AI, period. Specific rules, worked examples, explicit don’ts. A brief with those three things will outperform a clever one-liner every single time.

But wait! There’s more! I actually prompted Sonnet the same thing and its response gave us even more intel:

Artifacts can now remember things between sessions. There’s a real storage API baked in: it can save and retrieve data (JSON, key-value) inside an artifact, either private to you or shared across users. That means you can ask it to build you an actual persistent tool, a content tracker, a swipe file, a simple client-facing dashboard, and it holds state the next time you open it, instead of resetting every conversation.

It reads a “skill” playbook before making certain files. Before generating a Word doc, slide deck, spreadsheet, or PDF, it’s instructed to consult best-practice references first. Practical implication: naming the exact deliverable format (”as a Word doc,” “as a pptx”) triggers noticeably more polished output than just asking for “a document.”

It has real logic for when to use your stated preferences, and when not to. The prompt has detailed rules distinguishing behavioral preferences (how you want it to communicate) from contextual ones (facts about you, your business, your background), and it only applies the contextual ones when they’re actually relevant to what you asked. Building a real, structured preferences/context profile gets you selectively-applied personalization instead of your bio getting stapled onto every unrelated answer.

It has genuinely tiered research behavior. For simple facts it does one search; for medium tasks, several; for deep research it scales up to ten-plus before answering, and past a certain point it’s told to suggest the dedicated Research feature instead of half-assing it. Usage tip: competitor-analysis and content-synthesis prompts work better as open-ended asks (”research and map the landscape”) than as narrow ones, because the model is built to go broad on its own when the question calls for it.

It has a hard copyright ceiling you should design around, not fight. Quotes are capped under 15 words, one quote per source max, everything else must be paraphrased. So if you’re using Fable to help draft the newsletter itself and want it to pull from articles, ask for paraphrased synthesis with links, not verbatim excerpts, it structurally can’t give you long quotes even if you push.

Okay, so what do we DO with five more days?

Here’s the filter, and I want it tattooed behind your eyelids: if Opus or Sonnet could do it, don’t waste Fable tokens on it. Caption ideas, single emails, quick edits, that’s child’s play and it’ll still be there on the 13th.

Fable’s actual edge is the enormous context window plus senior-strategist synthesis: it can hold your entire business in its head at once and reason across all of it simultaneously. So the strategy this week is simple: use it for the heavy, one-time, compounding stuff. Assets that keep working for you after the model goes behind the meter.

Ten prompts, copy-paste ready:

1. The Brand Autopsy. Dump EVERYTHING! Your positioning, offer ecosystem, captions, carousels, emails, newsletters, subject lines, bio, sales page copy, three competitors, and the prompt: “Act as a brand strategist with zero loyalty to me. Audit this entire brand. Where is my positioning vague, where am I underpriced, where does my messaging contradict itself, and what is the one repositioning move that would change my next 12 months? Argue with me.” Fable’s long-horizon reasoning is where this shines.

2. Build Your Operating System. The single highest-ROI move: “Interview me, then write a complete operating manual for working with AI on my brand — my voice rules, banned phrases, audience psychology, product ladder, content formats, and decision-making logic. Structure it so any future AI model can run my brand from this document.” You build it on Fable once, then cheaper models execute it forever.

3. The Feedback Goldmine. Paste every testimonial, DM, comment, and client email you’ve hoarded: “Synthesize all of this into: the exact language my audience uses for their problems, the transformation they actually bought, three objections I’m not addressing, and two offers hiding in this data that I haven’t built yet.” Massive-context synthesis is literally the recommended use for the remaining window.

4. The Everything Synthesis. “Here is a year of my business: analytics exports, my top and flop posts, launch emails, DMs, testimonials, refund reasons [dump it all]. Find the patterns I can’t see from inside: what actually converts versus what I think converts, which topics spike saves, where my audience’s language differs from mine, and the through-line I should build next year around.” This is the job that used to cost five figures and a strategist who ghosts you for three weeks.

5. The Devil’s Advocate Pricing Session. “Here’s my full offer ladder and pricing. Stress-test it like a CFO who thinks I’m leaving money on the table and a customer who thinks I’m too expensive, at the same time. Where does the ladder break, what’s cannibalizing what, and what would you restructure?” High-stakes decisions are exactly what a Mythos-class model is for.

6. The Year of Content, Architected. Not “give me 30 post ideas”, but bigger: “Based on my pillars, audience, and offers, design a 12-month content architecture: quarterly narrative arcs, how each month ladders to a launch, and the recurring formats I should own. Then write the first month in full so I have the template.”

7. The One-Thread Launch. “Using my Brand Bible, architect my next launch end to end in this single conversation: positioning, offer structure, the full email sequence, content calendar, sales page outline, and creative briefs for every asset.” The flex here isn’t any single deliverable. It’s that nothing contradicts anything else, because one brain held all of it at the same time.

8. The Skill Audit. If you’ve built, purchased or downloaded any custom skills over the past year, I promise they could all probably be better. “Audit my Skills ecosystem as a whole: find contradictions between them, overlapping jobs, gaps nothing covers, outdated tool references, and places where two skills would fight over the same request. Then give me a rewrite plan ranked by impact. Then we’ll update.”

This one’s about volume, not brainpower: the problems live between documents, so the win is being able to hold your entire stack in view at once rather than reviewing one file at a time.

9. Write a new skill. Or ten. “Review my memory and interview me about a task I do over and over [name it], one question at a time: my exact process, my quality standards, my failure modes, what great output looks like versus mediocre. Then author a production-grade skill: trigger conditions, step-by-step workflow, voice rules, worked examples, and failure handling.”

Any capable model can draft a skill file. What a longer, deeper interview gets you is a skill with your actual judgment baked into the edge cases instead of generic best-practices filler, and Fable’s context room means the whole interview stays in play while it writes.

10. The Living Tool. “Build me an artifact that [describe the thing: tracks my content ideas / logs my swipe file / manages my client roster, be specific]. It should let me add new entries, see everything I’ve saved so far, and remember it all the next time I open it, don’t reset when the conversation ends. Ask me what fields or categories I need before you build it.”

This is the one nobody’s talking about yet: artifacts can now save data between sessions, which means you’re not just getting an answer, you’re getting an actual small tool that persists. Build the one thing you keep tracking in a random note app and never look at again.

Run a few or all of those before July 12th. You’ve got four more nights (probably) with the expensive model, take advantage. And let’s just hope Anthropic pulls a Cher and extends for three more years. (I do realize that logic doesn’t actually make sense since in three years time we’ll probably have gone through six newer, better models, but you get the gist 😉)

-Bots of Love, Your AI Auntie 🫶🏼

I’m currently on vacation with my sister and her family, and thanks to a bossy 3-year-old who has decided she will ONLY sleep next to her father, the sleeping arrangements have been reorganized like a hostage negotiation. My brother-in-law is on toddler terrorist duty in the other room. Which means my sister and I are sharing a bed like it’s 1994 and we’re about to fight over the remote.

Except the remote situation is peaceful this time, because we both want the exact same thing on the TV: the World Cup.

And every single game we’ve watched since the tournament started, the same moment keeps happening. We look at the screen and go…wait. Why is everyone wearing pink cleats!?

Not a few players. Everyone.

Like ALL of them. Bright, unmissable, Barbie-Dreamhouse pink, sprinkled across every pitch in North America. We clocked it early in the tournament and kept clocking it. Tonight it finally itched me enough that I did the thing I do, which is turn to my AI and go “explain this to me like I’m nosy.”

Turns out it’s real and it’s spectacular.

The part where five billion-dollar brands accidentally wore the same outfit

Here’s what I found. For this World Cup, basically every major boot brand (Nike, Adidas, Puma, New Balance and Skechers…yes, THAT Sketchers) independently released a pink-forward cleat pack. Nobody sent a group text. Nobody coordinated. They all just landed on pink.

Why? A few reasons the brands will happily give you.

Pink sits directly opposite green on the color wheel, so it’s the most visible thing you can possibly put on a grass field, on a TV, on someone’s cracked phone screen at a bar.

Players say loud colors make them feel more confident under pressure.

And per reporting in The Athletic, one boot expert basically shrugged and said this happens all the time now, because every brand’s trend team is drinking from the same data well.

Same data in. Same pink out.

“But wait, don’t the players pick their own shoes?”

Great question, and this is the part that makes the whole thing click, so stay with me.

Yes. Players choose their own cleats. The color is genuinely at their discretion. Nobody is out there forcing Kylian Mbappé’s feet into a specific shoe against his will.

BUT. And it’s a big but. They’re choosing from inside their sponsor’s catalog. If you’re a Nike athlete, you wear Nike. And Nike, months before the tournament, quietly designed one big World Cup “pack” and made pink the hero color across basically every boot in the lineup. So when Mbappé “picks,” he’s picking off a menu where every single option was already…pink.

Now multiply that by five brands who all made the same call, months in advance, without talking to each other. You get a pitch where 20 of the 22 starters chose freely and STILL ended up matching.

The choice is real. The menu is the trick.

And girl. That is the most accurate picture of using AI I have ever seen, and it’s in cleat form. You’re making real choices. You feel creative. You ARE choosing. But you’re choosing from defaults somebody else pre-loaded, built on the same data as the defaults everyone else is choosing from. Free will, factory settings. Both true at once.

The brands didn’t override the players. They just decided what was on the menu. Which, if you’ve ever accepted the first thing an AI handed you, is a sentence that should make you sit up a little.

“No one’s actually wearing Skechers, Lauren. Claude clearly made that up.”

So I’m lying there reading the deets out loud to my sister, doing my little research theater, and I get to the Skechers part.

I say Skechers made pink cleats now. And my sister, without even looking up, goes: “World Cup players are def not wearing SKETCHERS. Claude clearly just made that part up.”

And honestly? Fair. That is THE fear. That’s the one every single one of you has whispered to yourself at 2am. The robot is confidently lying to me, I’m going to repeat it at brunch, and I’m going to look insane.

So I checked.

Reader.

It was Harry Kane.

Now. My brother-in-law is British. Harry Kane is, functionally, a member of their family. So this is deeply relevant to the room.

The universe personally selected Harry Kane to prove my sister wrong

THE Harry Kane. European Golden Boot winner. Captain of England. Out there on the biggest stage in sports, in Skechers. It’s in the brand’s own press release, his little quote and everything.

Of every player it could have been to make Skechers sound fake, the universe reached into the drawer and pulled out the one guy in the house we could not dispute.

The AI didn’t make it up. The fact was just wiiiild enough to SOUND made up. Those are extremely different things, and the difference is the entire ballgame.

Here’s the part I actually want you to remember:

The thing that kept me from repeating garbage in this Substack wasn’t luck. And it wasn’t the AI being flawless (it’s not, none of them are, ever).

It was that I checked.

That’s the superpower. Not blind trust. Not blind fear. The boring, unsexy middle: collaborate, then confirm.

I say this constantly and I will now say it in my pajamas: conversation over command. You’re the creative director. The AI is your ridiculously fast, occasionally unhinged intern who read the entire internet and retained about 80% of it correctly. You would fact-check an intern before they made you look dumb in a meeting. Extend the bot the same courtesy. Verify, then vibe.

If that’s all you take from this, dope. We’re done. Go to sleep.

But there’s a bigger thing. And it’s spicier.

The real problem was the pink

Everyone’s terrified of AI hallucinating. Making stuff up. Getting a fact wrong.

Cool. Valid. Also? Catchable. You literally just watched me catch it in real time, in a bed, next to a sleeping adult woman who doubted me.

Here’s what almost nobody’s scared of, which is the exact thing they should be scared of. Five of the biggest, best-resourced creative brands on the entire planet pointed their trend teams at the same data and produced the same shoe. A whole World Cup of individual athletes, unique nations, and billion-dollar budgets, and the pitch turned into one uniform pink puddle.

A robot glitch didn’t do that. Five trend teams drinking from the same well did that.

THAT is what people mean by “AI slop,” they just don’t realize it yet. Slop was never the occasional wrong answer. Slop is the endless, identical, technically-fine, deeply forgettable sameness that shows up when everyone reaches for the same tool and asks it the same lazy question. A thousand people typing “make it pop” and getting the same pop.

Your POV is the thing the puddle can’t replicate.

Wanna know who I could actually SEE on that field? The handful of players who ignored the pink memo. Messi in his blue-and-white customs. Pulisic in his little star-spangled Pumas. They went off-menu. They asked for the thing the pack didn’t offer, refused the factory setting, and made the brand build around THEM instead of the other way around. In a sea of same, the person with a point of view is the only one your eye can even find.

The AI can match the trend. It’s genuinely great at the trend. What it cannot do is be YOU on purpose. Your taste. Your weird references. Your specific take. The joke only you would make. The thing you believe that the data hasn’t caught up to yet. That’s the un-sloppable part, and you should guard it with your life.

Use the tool. Please, use the tool, we are not doing fear here. But bring a POV to it, or you’re just adding more pink to the puddle.

Okay. So I wrote this last night while laying in bed but now I’m currently driving through the giraffe habitat at the African Lion Safari in Ontario, so I gotta go, but before I put the phone down, tell me in the comments: have you ever been SO sure the AI made something up, and it turned out to be completely, annoyingly true? I need to know I’m not alone in the Harry Kane of it all.

Bots of Love, Auntie Lo

Before I dig in, I do have to give Anthropic their flowers for one thing up top: they keep dropping major news right before my newsletter goes out, like somebody over there got ahold of my Artificial Insanity send schedule and started scheduling their chaos around it. That level of commitment to make sure I get you guys the news? Genuinely, I appreciate and respect it. Impeccable timing, really.

Full transparency on how we got here: today’s newsletter was supposed to be about something else entirely. But Monday afternoon I scrolled right into reel from an AI ethicist about how Claude was going to start asking for ID and all the reasons you shouldn’t give it to them, but not a single mention of who this was actually affecting, or why you might be asked, and, honestly, it kinda annoyed me. I thought, "this is obviously part of the story, so now the newsletter tomorrow I’ll break down all of it,” seeing as I’ve already been keeping you up to date on all things Anthropic for the last two weeks. (If you missed them because they weren’t on Substack, read ‘em here and here.)

So anyway, I go to find the reel again this morning to link it for you, and wouldn’t ya know it...it wasn’t there. Deleted. Or maybe archived? Either way, it was MIA. Interesting. My assumption is she realized that only sharing half the story isn’t, you know, the whole story. So let’s get into it.

Part One: Yes, Claude will start asking for ID in July. No, it probably won’t ask for yours.

Here’s what’s actually happening: Anthropic updated its privacy policy (published in June, takes effect July 8) with a new line saying it may ask users to verify their age or identity “in certain circumstances.” If you get flagged, that means uploading a scan of a passport or license, a selfie photo or video, and possibly a face geometry template, which is literally biometric data that states like Illinois actually legally protect.

Anthropic then clarified this applies to a small subset of users, specifically people whose accounts got flagged for potentially fraudulent activity but weren’t outright banned. It’s an appeals process.

The whole point is: instead of just nuking your account into the void, they’re giving you a way to go “no wait, I’m a real human, here’s proof, let me back in.”

Think of it like a credit-card fraud hold. Your card works perfectly fine for years, you are not getting a verification call every time you buy a latte. But the second the system clocks something weird (a charge in a country you’ve never set foot in, a random $4,000 purchase at 3am), it freezes up and makes you confirm it’s actually you before it lets you back in.

Most people rarely deal with it. It’s triggered by suspicious signals, not by existing. And it’s protective, the bank isn’t punishing you, it’s just checking that you’re actually you. That’s basically this. If you’re in Claude using it to help you write your newsletter or asking it to rewrite your breakup text into something dignified, you’re the latte. You’ll likely never be asked for ID, for now at least.

So when someone tells you “Claude requires government ID now,” the honest version is: Claude may ask a tiny flagged minority for ID as a way to NOT get permanently banned. Which is, you know. A completely different sentence.

Okay but what actually GETS you flagged?

Fair question, because “fraudulent activity” is doing a lot of vague lifting. Anthropic’s official wording is deliberately broad — fraud, abuse, policy violations, security stuff — but here’s what’s actually been tripping the automated detector for real people, based on documented cases:

🚩 Sketchy-looking payments. Prepaid cards, untrusted virtual cards, cards with a chargeback history, even a billing address that doesn’t match. One developer got auto-banned just trying to upgrade to a paid plan — the billing system tripped the wire.

🚩 VPNs and shared IPs. If you’re on a commercial VPN whose IP is also being used by scrapers, spammers, or bots, you can get swept up in what people call the “bad neighbor” effect, flagged for the company you didn’t even know you were keeping.

🚩 Multiple accounts on one device. Spinning up new logins to dodge usage limits. The system fingerprints your hardware and browser, so it clocks it.

🚩 Bot-style hammering. Running automated agents 24/7 against a subscription built for human use, or spoofing the client to get cheaper access.

🚩 Actual policy violations. The genuinely-against-the-rules content stuff. You know who you are. Except I hope you don’t because, hi, don’t break the rules, you make the rest of us look bad!

Here’s what you should consider though: this detection is automated, and automated systems scoop up innocent people constantly. Earlier this year an entire legit 60-person company had every single account nuked overnight; no explanation, no specific violation named, and the only way to appeal was (I wish I were kidding) a Google Form.

Which is, weirdly, the strongest argument for the ID thing.

If you’re a real human who got falsely flagged, an identity check gives you an actual way to prove you’re legit and claw your Claude access back, instead of losing everything to a trigger-happy algorithm and a Google Doc. The exact mechanism people are panicking about is, in a lot of cases, the lifeline they might need, by no fault of their own.

Also, once again, this did NOT drop in a vacuum

Here’s the context the panic post completely skipped: this ID news landed in the middle of the wildest few weeks Anthropic has had with the U.S. government. Quick catch-up, bullet-style because we probably both have ADHD and I’ve got more to cover.

• Back in March, the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” — a designation usually reserved for foreign adversaries — after the company refused to strip certain safety guardrails (think surveillance and autonomous weapons) from its military-facing products.

• June 12, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to block foreign nationals from using Fable 5 and Mythos 5, its most advanced models. Anthropic couldn’t reliably separate access by nationality, so it just...turned both models off for everyone. Including its own foreign-born employees. (Cybersecurity folks were big mad, defenders outside the U.S. lose their tool while attackers just shrug and use a different model.)

• Last Friday, after Dario Amodei (Anthropic co-founder) met Trump at the G7, Trump told Axios he no longer sees Anthropic as a national security threat. Okay??? Direct quote, and it’s such a quote: “Well, not now, but a week ago, maybe.” He even said a competitor and part-owner (cough, Amazon) is the one who “turned Anthropic in.” The girls are fighting.

• The catch: those formal Commerce restrictions are still technically on the books. A warm interview is not a signed policy reversal. So this isn’t fully resolved, just less on fire than it was seven days ago, I guess.

Now here’s where it gets juicy for our “read past the headline” thing. A lot of people are connecting the ID requirement directly to this Trump standoff — like Anthropic is suddenly demanding papers to appease the administration. And to be fair, a company under this much “who exactly is using your tools?” pressure has every incentive to tighten identity checks.

But Anthropic’s own team specifically said the ID appeals update is unrelated to the Fable/Mythos situation. So the timing made everyone draw a straight line between two things that the company says aren’t actually the same story.

Part Two: Claude has a bit of a Peter Thiel Problem

I’m not gonna sit here and tell you this is all fine and you’re silly for caring, because this IS a very real thing worth paying attention to. And it’s not so much the what as it is the who.

The company handling the personal information and your face data isn’t actually gonna be Anthropic. It’s a third-party verification vendor called Persona.

And Persona is backed by Founders Fund — the investment firm founded by none other than Peter Thiel. Yep, same Peter Thiel who’s chairman and co-founder of Palantir, the company that’s caught all kinds of heat for its surveillance work, including contracts with ICE. (Fun bonus: Thiel also invests in Anthropic itself, so the call is coming from inside several houses because of course it is.)

So your selfie, your license, and in some cases, your literal face geometry would be sitting on the servers of a company orbiting the most surveillance-coded venture guy in tech. Sweet.

It gets crunchier. Anthropic decides how long Persona holds onto your documents, but when TechCrunch asked when that data gets deleted, the spokesperson didn’t say. For contrast: Roblox, another Persona customer, says user images are deleted immediately after processing. “We won’t tell you when we delete it” and “we delete it instantly” are not the same energy, babe.

And the kicker: Persona can still get hit with U.S. government demands for any user info it’s storing. So the data doesn’t have to leak to end up somewhere you didn’t consent to. It can just be...requested.

This is the part worth caring about. Not “ID bad,” but “who’s holding the ID, for how long, and who can come knocking for it.”

Part Three: We have LITERALLY seen this movie. It's called Discord.

Earlier this year, Discord picked Persona as a partner for its age verification rollout. Users found out. Users said — and I’m paraphrasing the collective Discord community here — absolutely the fuck not.

The backlash was loud enough that Discord publicly distanced itself from Persona, delayed its whole global rollout to the second half of 2026, and set a new rule that any face-scanning partner has to do it entirely on-device so your biometric data never leaves your phone. They said Persona didn’t clear that bar. Thats a brand that listens to its users. We stan.

Why were users already primed to revolt? Because Discord had just disclosed that around 70,000 users’ government ID photos got exposed when a third-party vendor it used got breached. So when they heard “we’re partnering with another ID vendor,” the community’s nervous system was already in fight-or-flight. Reasonable response.

So let’s connect the dots: the exact vendor that Discord’s users rejected so hard the company re-negged in public...is the vendor Anthropic just quietly named in its updated privacy policy. Cooooool, cool, cool.

The difference though, is scope. Discord wanted to card a chunk of its whole user base by default. Anthropic is only carding flagged accounts trying to appeal a ban. That’s a meaningfully smaller and more defensible use case.

But “we picked the vendor your friends already torched” is still a choice, and I’d want to know they learned from Discord’s whole situation, like maybe matching Roblox’s “information deleted immediately” policy instead of the mysterious “we’ll decide” one.

The lesson to take away: when you’re using or recommending tools to your clients and community, the model is only half the trust equation. The plumbing matters too. Who touches the data matters. This is the unsexy due-diligence part of being an AI-literate human, and it’s exactly the part that makes you sound like the smartest person in the room when everyone else is just reacting to the first 10 seconds of a Reel.

Okay. Deep breath. Shake it out. Let’s leave the discourse swamp and go somewhere that’ll actually make your week easier, because something genuinely useful dropped last week and it got buried under all the Anthropic noise, again.

Part Four: Claude Design got a glow-up (and fixed its worst habit)

If you haven’t played with Claude Design yet, it’s Anthropic’s design tool that turns a prompt into actual designs, wireframes, prototypes, slide decks, carousels and one-pagers. Over a million people used it in its first week, which, sure, flex. But the April version had two problems every designer in here would’ve clocked immediately: it generated pretty-but-generic stuff that looked nothing like your brand, and it ate tokens like it was carb-loading for a robot marathon.

Last week’s update (June 17) went straight for both. Here’s what’s new, ADHD-bullet style:

It actually stays on brand now. You can import your own design system from a GitHub repo, design files, or raw uploads, and Claude builds with your components, checks its work against your system, and self-corrects before it shows you anything. So instead of generic slop, the output inherits your colors, type, spacing, the whole vocabulary. For anyone who’s ever screamed “that is NOT my brand font” at a screen, which, hi, me, this one’s for you.

You can finally edit on the canvas. This is the headline, IMO. Before, iterating meant typing “move the CTA left” like you were giving directions to a very polite ghost. Now there are real controls like changing fonts, color, padding, tracking, resize, align elements directly. WYSIWYG, like a grown-up design tool.

It talks to Claude Code now (both directions). Design something, hand it off to Claude Code to build, and it picks up from your actual work instead of rebuilding from a screenshot. The screenshot-ping-pong era is ending and I, for one, will not miss it.

It stopped torching your tokens. It now shares usage limits with chat, Cowork, and Code, uses fewer tokens per turn, and has way lower error rates. Translation: you can actually finish a long building session without hitting a wall halfway through your good idea.

Plus it exports to PDF and PowerPoint now and connects to Adobe Express, Canva, Gamma, Vercel, Replit, Wix, Miro and more. It’s at claude.ai/design or in the desktop sidebar now, on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise.

The bigger picture, for us specifically: this is AI design tooling that’s finally being built to respect your system instead of overriding your taste. Which is the whole thing I keep yelling about. The tools are catching up to “collaborator, not competition.”

What Auntie’s Actually Into RN

Okay, gears fully switched, because I want this newsletter to be more personal than just an RSS feed of Anthropic updates. Consider this the bonus content.

📖 Reading: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. I’m a chaotic audiobook-AND-Kindle girl (I trade off depending on whether my hands are on a steering wheel or I’m on a walk), and I started this one Sunday on the drive home from Indiana — I’m about three-quarters through and honestly, it’s birth control without being birth control, iykyk.

The premise is delicious: Natalie is a tradwife influencer whose dreamy homestead brand, Yesteryear Ranch, is completely staged. Think nannies raising the kids she secretly hates, producers in the wings, industrial fridges hidden behind the rustic-farmhouse aesthetic, a husband who’s heir to a political dynasty. Then out of the blue, she wakes up in the actual brutal reality of 1855 and has to figure out whether it’s an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, time travel, or something genuinely fucked up. It’s a dark, biting, very funny satire (but is it?) about the performance of womanhood and the lie underneath a too-perfect image — which, after I just spent this whole issue yelling about not trusting the polished surface, is almost suspiciously on theme. It’s a #1 NYT bestseller, a GMA Book Club pick, and it’s being made into a film with Anne Hathaway. Read it before the movie ruins your mental casting, obviously.

🎧 Listening: Two episodes living rent-free in my skull, both in the “maybe don’t swallow the empowerment pitch whole” genre:

• The “Rise” and Fall of the Girlboss — Diabolical Lies. (Plot twist: this is the podcast Caro, who wrote Yesteryear, co-hosts — so the universe is being very cute right now.) Her co-host Katie does a genuinely nuanced autopsy of the Lean In / #GIRLBOSS / corporate-feminism era — we got sold “just lean in, hustle harder, and you’ll win,” we all bought the poly-blend boss-babe tee, and... did it actually work? Or did we just get a t-shirt? Recommended to me by my girl Sam Ogborn, who has impeccable taste and I trust her implicitly.

  Diabolical Lies

  The "Rise" and Fall of the Girlboss

  Listen now

  3 months ago · 292 likes · 53 comments · Katie Gatti Tassin and caro claire burke

• The Mel Robbins Griftpocalypse — A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein (with Princess Weekes + Kat Tenbarge). Same lineage, different guru. A fair, funny, and pretty surgical look at the self-help empire — books, sold-out speeches, protein smoothies — built on “the only thing standing in your way is you,” and everything that message conveniently leaves out about the very real systems also standing in your way.

Notice that throughline? Both eps are about individual-empowerment-as-product — flexing the exact same “read past the shiny narrative” muscle this entire newsletter is built on. I’d love to say I planned that. I did not. The brain just does this now.

📺 Watching: Love Island USA. No notes, no shame, fully feral about it. I’m honestly hate watching it at this point, but I can’t stop and I need more people to talk about it with, so leave your thoughts. I have so many thoughts. Reply with yours! Also, Real Housewives of Rhode Island Reunion, Part 1. Oh. My. God. One of the best premier Housewives season reunions I’ve ever seen, but these women are actually insane! Thank god that season is wrapped because I need a break from Liz, Kelsey and Rulla immediately. Alicia is my queen, who woulda thought!?

💰Buying: I’ve been really into these Spicy Jalapeno Mates, so fucking good! They’re like a crunchy, airy pillow of spicy cheese cracker, but like, different. I can’t explain it. Just try them, you won’t regret it. Or maybe you will, but if you like Cheeze-Itz, I definitely think you’ll like these even more! Also, I’ve been dreaming out this Fruited Fields NA Radler summer edition from Athletic Brewing since I had it a few weeks ago, as well as the Liquid Death Strawberry Terror. My AIM screen name in high school was strwbrycrush2 because I was obsessed with, well, Strawberry Crush. I honestly was gobsmacked that this wasn’t actually soda. Five stars.

🎤 THE WRAP

The takeaway for the whole issue, in one line: the move is never “panic” or “nothing to see here.” It’s reading past the headline and deciding for yourself.

Now, that joke up top about Anthropic scheduling their drama drops around my weekly send? Funny because it’s happened to be true. I’ve opened basically every recent issue with their news. But one of these weeks they’re gonna leave me high and dry with absolutely nothing to report, and when that day comes, I’ll need a backup plan. I mean I have one, but I want to know what YOU want.

So here’s your part: hit reply (or drop it in the comments) and tell me what you actually want me to dig into next. A tool everyone keeps name-dropping that you still don’t get? A workflow you want broken all the way down? AI drama you want decoded minus the acronyms you don’t understand? A brand breakdown? Deconstruct a strategy? I’ll read every single one, and the best ones become whole issues.

Don’t make me depend on Anthropic’s chaos calendar forever, help a girl out. 🩷

See You Next Tuesday! 😉
Lauren, Your AI Auntie

Hi. I know it’s been a minute. Or more like…10 months. But let’s ignore that for a second because I need you to picture something with me.

You're lying on your couch. It's 9pm. You're doing the thing where you're technically watching Netflix but you're also spiraling about the seventeen things on your list that didn't get done today because your brain decided to hyperfocus on reorganizing your Notion for four hours instead.

(Don't look at me like that. You know exactly what I'm talking about.)

You pick up your phone, open Claude, type: "Compile my research notes on AI image trends, draft an outline for a new course module, and organize the files on my desktop by project."

And then you put the phone back down.

And when you wake up in the morning, it's done.

Like, DONE, done.

What is Claude Dispatch, and why does it matter more than the headlines suggest?

Anthropic dropped Dispatch as part of their Cowork feature (in research preview) on March 17, 2026, and the tech press covered it the way tech press always covers things: a lot of words about "agentic AI" and "asynchronous task execution" and whatever else makes it sound like something only someone with a CS degree should care about.

I'm here to translate.

Here's what Dispatch actually does, in human: your AI runs on your computer, in the background, while you're doing other things — or nothing at all. You assign it tasks from your phone. It coordinates multiple workstreams simultaneously, pulls from your files, your tools, your existing context, and comes back with finished work.

Not a first draft of a first draft. Actual, usable output.

It's the difference between AI as a conversation partner you have to babysit and AI as a capable collaborator who can hold down the fort while you're living your life.

That distinction matters because it's not small. It's actually the whole thing.

The bottleneck has never been the AI's capability. It’s always been our attention.

Think about how you actually use AI right now.

You open a tab. You type a prompt. You wait. You read. You refine. You try again. The AI is doing the generating, but you are still doing the managing — the monitoring, the iterating, the tab-switching, the "okay one more pass" spiral that eats forty-five minutes before you realize you were supposed to be on a call…or in a therapy sesh.

Dispatch removes you from that loop.

Not from the judgment. Not from the taste. Not from the decision of what good looks like because that still very much requires you, and it always will.

But from the supervision. The babysitting. The part where you're technically working but mostly just watching AI load. To Anthropic’s credit, they do you some pretty fun language to tell you that it’s working, but I can’t laugh at that all day.

For people with ADHD, this is actually significant in ways I want to say louder than I'm able to in a newsletter. The executive function tax of task-switching — of holding a dozen open loops in your brain while trying to manage an AI conversation — is real, and it is real exhausting.

Dispatch externalizes the loop management. You set the intention, you set the task, and you get to stop holding it in your head. The AI holds it. It runs. You come back.

While the tech world talks about 'efficiency,' let’s call it what it really is: a lifeline for anyone whose brain struggles with the executive function tax. It’s the accessibility feature we’ve been waiting for.

What can it actually do right now?

Fair question. Here's the honest answer: Dispatch is in research preview as of right now — meaning it works, and it's also still being refined, but…

Research and synthesis. Point it at a topic, give it context, come back to a compiled brief. This alone is worth the price of admission if research is a bottleneck for you.

File organization and cleanup. I had it audit my desktop. Reader, it was illuminating.

Draft generation at scale. First drafts of emails, outlines, this literal article that you’re reading, module structures, you know, the stuff that takes time not because it's hard but because starting is hard.

Running parallel tasks. This is the sleeper feature. Dispatch coordinates multiple sub-tasks simultaneously, which means a job that would take you forty-five minutes of back-and-forth can come back in the time of its longest piece.

Honestly, seems like anything that Cowork can do, it can do, because it’s really just a walkie-talkie telling Claude what to do from your phone and reporting back.

It even generated the images at the top of this Substack, using a Nano Banana MCP that I’d installed two weeks ago 🤯 (let me know if you want more info on this!)

We are in the orchestration era and most people haven't noticed.

What's happening isn't just "AI is getting better at doing things." It's that AI is getting better at coordinating. Multiple specialized agents, each focused on a specific task, talking to each other and reporting up. The same way a great creative team works, not one person doing everything, but specialists in their lane, with a director calling the shots.

Guess who's the director?

You. Still. Always.

So what does this mean for you, specifically?

If you’re running the show by yourself—the content, the brand, the whole damn thing—this move toward orchestration is about to become your new bestie.

Your job title is changing. Not your expertise because that's actually more valuable than ever. But your role is shifting from executor toward director. The premium skill is no longer producing content fast. It's knowing what to produce, why, for whom, and whether what the AI gave you is actually good.

The bottleneck shifts inward. When AI can handle execution at speed, the thing that slows you down becomes your own clarity. Do you know what you want? Can you articulate it specifically enough for a capable system to go execute it? Can you evaluate the output with taste and judgment? That's the work now.

Your community matters more, not less.

The people who will get the most out of tools like Dispatch aren't necessarily the most technical — they're the ones who have strong taste, clear vision, and a community of people learning alongside them.

I do want to be real with you though, because that's the deal we made when you signed up to wanna read my shit.

There's a huge risk here: the slop pipeline. When AI can produce at this speed and volume, the temptation is to let it. To ship everything it gives you, because producing feels like working, and your content calendar is always hungry.

Do not do that. I repeat: DO NOT DO THAT.

The brands and creators who will win in an AI-orchestrated world aren't the ones who output the most. They're the ones whose output still sounds like a human thought about it. Still has a perspective. Still has edges. Still has the particular texture of a real person's judgment running through it.

AI generates. You curate. You direct. You decide.

Think of that final layer of human touch as your signature; it’s the only thing the AI can’t replicate and the main reason your audience stays.

Okay, so now what?

If you have access to Claude Max (rolling out soon for Pro users), Dispatch should be available to you right now, try updating your Desktop app and going into your settings, you should see it there.

I’d say definitely worth trying. Not just to play with it, but to build the muscle of thinking in tasks: getting specific about what you actually want done, which is its own surprisingly useful skill.

If you're not there yet, start practicing the thing that will matter regardless of which tool you use: clarity of creative direction. The better you get at articulating what you want (with specificity, with context, with taste), the better every AI tool gets for you.

That skill compounds. In fact, you’re looking at the results of it. I asked Dispatch to research this piece, actually add it as a draft in Substack, and generate that image at the top, in my style and brand colors (without me having to tell it my style and colors).

It did all of it. Because it was pulling from my past writing and specific context, and now I’m sitting here at the airport bar drinking a mimosa and chatting to the woman next to me about the joys of being childless while giving it a single once-over instead of a total rewrite.

Claude didn't replace me; it just cleared the path for me to be the Editor-in-Chief of my own life. I highly suggest trying it yourself.

Bots of Love,
Lo, Your AI Auntie

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PS. The irony of writing about Claude Dispatch using Claude Dispatch is not lost on me. I directed it. It drafted. I rewrote. We're a team. This is fine. 😊

When I last left you yesterday, I was being unceremoniously kicked out of the ER at 2:30 AM, date’s truck keys in hand, while he was wheeled off to the cardiology unit for overnight observation.

The Morning-After Anxiety

Let me tell you about a very specific, very cursed kind of anxiety: knowing a man you met HOURS ago might be dying in a hospital bed of a brain bleed because your sexual prowess short-circuited his cardiovascular system. (My toxic trait? Believing I’m both the problem and the solution.)

I slept, like, two hours. Maybe. How could I? What if he texted me for a ride and I missed it? What if he was stuck at the hospital because I was unconscious while he was…well, formerly unconscious? What if the next text was from the hospital staff, asking for my alibi?

By 5:00 AM, I was wide awake, mainlining cortisol and frantically replying to my absolutely UNHINGED group chat of eight women I’ve known since kindergarten and high school. They’d received exactly TWO texts from me the night before:

9:00 from the bar bathroom because we know I was already pretty into him, I sent a single: “you guyyyyys!!”

12:01am: “Well that took a turn. I’m in an ambulance.”

One of them woke up at 3am, saw this cryptic update, and predictably FREAKED THE FUCK OUT.

By morning, my phone was blowing up with “HELLLLO??” “ARE YOU OKAY??” “Are you in jail or just ghosting us?” Which, honestly, gave me something to do while waiting for updates from the disaster artist himself.

I sent them a three-minute-long voice note because my thumbs were too tired to type out the full saga and my brain was too fried to summarize the rollercoaster of emotions.

I was spiraling. I was convinced his brain had to be bleeding from how hard he hit both times. I didn’t care what the tests said—I was a doctor now. So was the group chat. (To be fair, a couple of them are actually in medicine, but the rest are just here for the drama.)

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The Plot Twist You Couldn’t Make Up

Because apparently the universe looked at my life and said, “You know what this first-date-turned-medical-emergency needs? A crossover episode.” Plot twist incoming.

I’m laying in bed, running on two hours of sleep, and no food, when the universe decides to sprinkle in a little extra chaos: My friend suggests texting our other friend who, and I cannot make this shit up, works as a doctor, at this very fucking hospital, in that very unit. Coooool, cool, cool.

Because why not add a dash of “small world, big cringe” to my morning?

Honestly, if I pitched this to Netflix, they’d send it back for being too unrealistic.

Naturally, I text my doctor friend before 6am: “Heeeeeey, been a minute! Soooo, funny story…” (If you ever get a text like this from me, just know you’re about to hear something that will make you question your own reality.)

I give him the SparkNotes version, then ask the only question that matters: “He didn’t die overnight, right?”

To his eternal credit, my friend doesn’t flinch. No judgment, no follow-ups, just a simple, “He’s alive, conscious, and getting care.” Iconic.

This should have been comforting. Instead, it launched me into a new layer of anxiety: Was my high school friend now giving a physical to the man I’d just slept with? Was his dad (also a doctor there, because of course) involved? Were they connecting dots? Gossiping in the break room? Adding this to the “Lauren’s Greatest Hits” file?

8:30: “Hey, I think I’m gonna be able to get out of here soon. They just finished the last test. Wanna get breakfast once you break me out of here?”

Pause. Sir, you want to go eat with your potential murderer? Yeah we joked last night in the ER about this, but I thought that was the concussion talking. Shouldn’t you want to, I don’t know, go home, shower, and sleep for twelve hours? Not immediately make brunch plans with the woman who may or may not have almost killed you? At least he remembers stuff, I guess. Silver linings.

Another two hours. Radio silence.

I update the group chat, my friends, ever the sages, remind me that hospitals operate on a time scale known only to DMV employees and glaciers.

Every communication gap sends me spiraling into new conspiracy theories. Did he collapse again? Did his brain finally tap out? Did my friend or his doctor dad find something horrifying? Has the staff decided I’m a sex-crazed predator who disables men with my WAP and a well-timed pizza topping debate?

The anxiety was Olympic-level, people.

Turns out he fell asleep because, well, you read the story. But then ended up having to wait another three hours to actually get discharged. Snails pace, these hospitals.


The Hospital Rescue Mission

When I finally hear that he can split, I move his monster ass truck out of my driveway and drive down the road to scoop him. I navigated the hospital like it was the world’s worst escape room since he didn’t even really know where he was, just a sole room number. Endless beige hallways, zero clues, and a vague sense that I might never see daylight again.

Eventually, I found him in what could only be described as a broom closet masquerading as a hospital room, crammed into what may as well have been a child-sized bed, his 6’3” frame folded up like origami.

His face said, “GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE,” with enough desperation to power the entire hospital’s back-up generator.

But the look he gave me when I produced his shoes and shirt? Pure, unfiltered relief. “OMG THANK YOU! I thought I was gonna have to walk out of here in a gown and barefoot.” Not on my watch, buddy. If anyone’s doing a walk of shame, it’s going to be on their own terms.

As we made our escape to my car, I braced for the inevitable awkwardness. What’s the etiquette for the morning after your casual hookup turns into a full-blown medical drama? Is there a Hallmark card for this?

“So…how are you feeling? What’d they say?” I asked, channeling the chillest version of myself, despite having spent the night convinced I’d be charged with accidental manslaughter.

“HUNGRY,” he said. “Really fucking hungry.”

Obviously. Neither of us had eaten since before the date—roughly 18 hours ago, but who’s counting? (Me. I was counting, I am always counting.)

And then, just as I was starting to think we might be in the clear, he casually dropped this little bombshell: “Oh, also, they asked me if I thought you drugged me.”

I nearly drove into the parking garage wall. “I’m sorry, WHAT!?”

“Yeah, like three separate times. They were all, ‘I know you just met her, but is there any chance she slipped something in your drink?’”

No! No, no, no! That was supposed to be an intrusive thought, not an actual plot twist.

“What did you tell them?” I asked, already picturing myself on a hospital watchlist under ‘suspicious Tinder girls.’

He laughed. “I told them that if you HAD drugged me, calling 911 twice, riding in the ambulance, and sitting in the ER for hours would make you the worst criminal in history. Plus, they literally have my urine sample.”

Logic. Sweet, beautiful logic.

Raybans For Your Services

We headed toward downtown Naperville in search of sustenance. As we were crossing the street to the patio, he made a request:

“Can we hop into this Walgreens real quick? I need sunglasses.”

Cue me, slipping into full “let me flex my local tour guide muscles” mode. “There’s actually a Sunglass Hut right on the next block if you want, like, sunglasses that won’t snap in half if you look at them wrong?”

He agreed, because obviously, and we redirected.

The moment we walked in, the saleswoman greeted us with: “Welcome! We’re having a buy one, get 40% off sale today!”

He looked at me, dead serious: “Pick whatever you want.”

I did the whole “oh my god, you don’t have to do that!” thing, but let’s be honest, I’m not about to turn down a free pair of cute sunnies. (If you do, that’s a red flag.)

The saleswoman, sensing the crackle of chaos in the air, asked how we knew each other.

“This is actually our first date,” I said, like I was announcing a raffle winner.

Her eyebrows shot up, channeling the nurses from last night: “A FIRST date? And you’re buying her sunglasses?”

“Well,” my date replied, deadpan as a morgue slab, “I nearly died in her kitchen last night, so it seemed appropriate.”

We ended up telling the whole saga to not one but TWO saleswomen, who were equal parts horrified, nosy, and low-key living for it. By the time we left, I was wearing a new pair of Ray-Bans I absolutely did not need, but his “thank you for not letting me become a corpse on your kitchen floor” gift to me.

Honestly, if all my first dates want to start with trauma and end with designer accessories, I’m listening.

The Lunch of Survivors

We found a patio, collapsed into chairs, and instantly became one with the furniture. Physically and emotionally bankrupt, but still somehow obsessed with how gorgeous the day was—because trauma, but make it aesthetic.

We inhaled sandwiches and approximately a gallon of water each. (Dehydration from beer, weed, sex, and medical emergencies is real.) We recapped the previous night’s chaos, like two war veterans comparing battle scars, except our battlefield was my kitchen and our enemies were gravity and questionable life choices.

Naturally, the universe was not done with us. Out of nowhere, a patio umbrella from another table caught a gust of wind and decided to audition for America’s Next Top Final Destination Scene. It came hurtling toward us—so we both ducked, convinced this was how our story would end: death by rogue patio décor.

Okay, fine. The umbrella did fly loose and come at us, but it didn’t actually almost decapitate us. That was just my brain, still in “main character in a disaster movie” mode. But it felt right for the story, so let’s keep a little drama.

Once the umbrella crisis had passed, I looked at him, equal parts amused and concerned for my own safety. “So…is this just…normal for you? The near-death experiences?”

That’s when I learned that my date was in a long term relationship with the Grim Reaper.

His baseball career? Ended by a 99mph fastball to the skull.

His love for the outdoors? Once resulted in him falling off a cliff at Starved Rock and only being rescued by a random couple right before sunset.

And now, his dating life includes almost dying on a kitchen floor after sex.

At this point, I’m starting to wonder if I just matched with Death’s favorite bachelor. Should I be flattered? Or pick up some holy water?

Making Trauma a Bop (Literally)

After lunch, we returned to my place so he could grab his truck. Common sense says a man who just survived a possible concussion and an overnight in the hospital should not be operating heavy machinery. But at this point, we’d both given up on “should.” We were living exclusively in the land of “YOLO and questionable choices.”

Before he left, we obviously made a song about it. Have you met me?

As he’s leaving, he hits me with, “So…second date? Can I take you out Friday for a proper dinner?” (Technically third date, if you count “hospital gown chic” as date attire.)

I said absolutely. Because if you can survive a man nearly dying on your kitchen floor, you can survive literally any dating awkwardness. Once you’ve called 911 together, the bar for “embarrassing” is just…gone.

Also, my group chat, their children and partners are now emotionally and creatively invested. They’ve already created AI-generated concepts and movie posters for “Faint of Heart,” built a Spotify soundtrack (including “Last Name” by Carrie Underwood and “How To Save A Life” by The Fray, obviously), and are pitching our story to Sundance. They’re in deeper than I am.

And of course I’ve already submitted a public records request for my 911 calls—because if we’re still talking, I fully plan to cue them up for our one-week anniversary with this song I had ChatGPT write, that I immediately copy pasted into Suno, so lyrics aren’t perfect but they are hilarious!) playing in the background.

Nothing says romance like reliving your own shared trauma via a .wav file set to a song about the whole experience but make it a bop that sounds like Taylor. Who needs a mixtape when you’ve got paramedics narrating your love story?

The Follow-Up

Despite potentially being hunted by the universe itself, my date showed an impressive display of responsibility by going to his doctor on Wednesday for a follow-up.

The results? A clean bill of health. His heart was normal. His blood pressure was fine. They wanted to do a stress test just to be thorough, but medically speaking, there was no explanation for why a healthy man would suddenly lose consciousness mid-convo.

The only logical conclusion? My WAP has supernatural powers that modern medicine cannot explain.

Or, ya know, what his doctor told him: stress-induced vasovagal syncope, aka the body’s way of going “nope” when overwhelmed by things like stress, anxiety, dehydration, and, apparently, great sex.

Yes, sex can cause it. Ask ChatGPT if you don’t believe me. Or just ask my group chat full of fake doctors, because this was absolutely their top diagnoses, right ahead of “demon possession” “undiagnosed gluten (or commitment) allergy” and “just a man being dramatic.”

The Actual Test (Spoiler: Not Darts)

Anyway, if you’re still here, we’ve officially come to the end of the story…for now.

I used to think darts was my go-to test for a guy’s character—does he get competitive, does he sulk if I win, does he pretend to care when I explain the rules for the fifth time? Cute, but honestly, I’m realizing now that that’s JV-level screening.

Because in the past three days, I’ve learned way more about John than any dartboard could tell me. He’s responsible (actually followed up and went to his doctor and doesn’t just ChatGPT by way of WebMD his way into denial). He loves his family and is weirdly normal about it. He’s educated and interesting—even while concussed. Our humor and texting energies? Perfectly matched, which is, let’s be real, maybe the most important metric.

But here’s the bonus round: he can clearly laugh at himself, didn’t flinch when my friends started diagnosing him like a live episode of Grey’s Anatomy (while also genuinely worrying about him, they’re also not monsters), and somehow still looked hot after a night in the ER.

So yeah, darts are fun and all, but surviving a medical emergency, passing the group chat’s diagnostic gauntlet, keeping up with my texts, and still managing to be hot in fluorescent hospital lighting? That’s the real test.

John, congrats, you’re officially off probation, I’ll see ya tonight! And if you could un-invite Death as our third wheel this time, that’d be grrrrreat!

Still recovering, still oversharing, and still waiting for my 911 mixtape,
Lauren, Your AI Auntie

P.S. What was your favorite part of this whole shit show? Share it with us below, we’ll laugh about it over dinner tonight, if we make it that long 😉

P.P.S. This entire three-part series was written with the help of ChatGPT, Claude and Dia. Chat handled our initial remembering of what had just happened while we waiting in the ER. I moved that convo transcript into Claude to help me with the initial outlining and drafting.

I then used Dia (a browser that is still in alpha testing from The Browser Company) to act as my editor and go through each section to make it really sing.

I used ChatGPT and Sora to help with all of the image prompts and generating the images themselves.

If you want to learn how you can be using AI to help you turn your chaos into content like this, in a voice that actually feels like you and connects with the exact people that you want it to, annnnd create images like the ones you saw, then hop on the BAIS CAMP waitlist, doors open later this month!

Join The Waitlist

Welcome back trauma enthusiasts!

When we last left off yesterday, my hot date had just performed the world's most dramatic interpretation of "falling for someone" by cracking his skull on both my refrigerator AND my hardwood floor in rapid succession and the paramedics were now en route.

What happened next was nothing short of miraculous.

The Paramedic Invasion

Despite having been essentially DEAD for two and a half minutes, this man—this absolute SPECIMEN of survival instinct—somehow managed to regain enough consciousness to realize he was pantless in a stranger's kitchen with emergency services on the way.

"Paramedics are close," I told him as he blinked back to life, still sprawled on my floor.

“My pants, please find my pants!” he pleaded.

I found them laying in a pile and threw them over to him.

Through sheer force of will and what I can only assume was the evolutionary male fear of being found naked by authority figures, he managed to stand himself up and put on his pants far faster than someone who had just experienced multiple traumatic head injuries should be capable of.

The speed with which a nearly-dead man can put on pants when faced with potential public nudity is truly one of nature's most impressive phenomena. If scientists could harness whatever adrenaline surge powers the "oh shit, I'm naked and strangers are coming" response, we could probably solve the energy crisis.

I saw the ambulance lights through the window now, just as he finished this Herculean task of basic clothing, though he was still swaying like a palm tree in a hurricane.

I’m now realizing I also should dress myself, frantically searching for my own clothes like a contestant on some twisted reality show called "Dress Before They Think You're A Murderer."

I found some pants, yanked them on right as the front door opened and FIVE PARAMEDICS walked in. Not one. Not two. FIVE. Apparently, "frantic woman potentially murders Bumble date" warrants the full emergency response team.

They flooded into my kitchen with equipment, walkie-talkies squawking, gurney wheels probably fucking up my hardwood worse than his head did.

My date was now standing (barely), leaning heavily against my counter, still pale as a ghost but remarkably vertical for someone who should probably be horizontal.

The lead paramedic—a stone-faced man with the emotional range of a filing cabinet—immediately moved to support my date.

"Sir, you need to sit down. Can you hear me? Do you know where you are?"

"Mmmmurgh," my date eloquently replied, allowing himself to be guided back to a chair.

The atmosphere was tense, clinical, and entirely devoid of humor—like being audited by the IRS while also being suspected of a felony.

"What happened exactly?" the lead paramedic asked me, his tone flat enough to use as a spirit level.

I explained the situation, trying to sound like a responsible adult and not someone whose sexual prowess had just caused a medical emergency:

"We were talking right here in the kitchen. He went lights out int he middle of a sentence. Came to. Tried to stand. Hit his head on the fridge. Then the floor."

"Were you drinking?" Another paramedic asked, notepad ready, expression stern.

"A two or three beers. And a shot."

"Any drugs?"

The room felt suddenly very small and very quiet. I could feel their judgment thickening the air. I could also see the joints literally laying on the counter in front of them. He was actually probably staring at them ask he asked the questions.

Fuck it. Full disclosure.

"We smoked weed, we drank beer, had a single shot hours ago and we just hooked up!"

I blurted it all out like a criminal confession, regardless of the fact that everything we’d just one was 1) very normal and 2) very legal in Illinois.

But I was clearly wanting to get ahead of any potential lies they might think I was telling because hi, I’ve watched TV before…

The paramedics exchanged glances and not the amused kind, but the "make a note of that" kind that makes your stomach drop.

I tried to lighten the mood with a joke. Something about this being a hell of a first date story.

Nothing. Not even a courtesy smile from these fuckin’ guys. Just five pairs of eyes that said, "Ma'am, a man almost died in your kitchen. This is serious."

At least John smiled and laughed.

They took his vitals. Blood pressure: dangerously low. Pulse: concerning. Consciousness: debatable.

"We need to get him to the hospital," the lead paramedic announced with all the emotion of someone reading a grocery list.

I knew that part was coming, but there was no way in hell I was letting this man go to the hospital alone. I mean, yes we had just met mere hours before, but I'm not a monster. You don't send someone to the emergency room solo after they've nearly died in your kitchen. Twice. That's just basic human decency, right?

"Can I come with you?" I asked the paramedics, already mentally preparing to grab my purse and find some shoes.

One of the paramedics looked me up and down. "You can drive and meet us there."

I stared at him in disbelief.

"Sir, I JUST told you I've been drinking and smoking. You want me to DRIVE?"

The paramedic exchanged glances with his colleagues, as if just realizing the problem with his suggestion.

"Good girl," said one of the older guys, with the enthusiasm of someone being forced to do paperwork. "You can ride with us."

I ran to grab my phone charger—because if there's one thing worse than sitting in an ER with a man you just met, it's doing so with a dead phone—and scrambled into the ambulance.

When An Uber Won’t Cut It

I was directed to sit in the front passenger seat, not in the back with John. This meant that for the entire ride, I was stuck next to the stoic driver, trying to process the absolute insanity of what had just happened in my kitchen.

The cabin was quiet except for the occasional radio chatter and the sounds of medical equipment being adjusted in the back. The driver stared straight ahead, focused on the road, while I sat there having an existential crisis in the passenger seat.

In an attempt to make sense of the chaos—and because silence makes me deeply uncomfortable—I basically monologued the entire story to the driver. Again. From the beginning.

"So we met on Bumble literally TODAY. We were just having a normal conversation in my kitchen, and he just... passed out. While SITTING DOWN. Then he hit his head on my fridge AND my floor."

The driver nodded occasionally, probably thinking, "Lady, I heard all this already."

"I mean, is that normal? Do people just...faint like that?”

More silent nodding.

"I'm just worried he's going to be pissed, you know? This has to be the most expensive first date ever. An ambulance ride and ER visit because we hooked up? I don't even know his last name!"

By the time we pulled up to the emergency entrance, I had recounted the entire saga twice more, each time adding new details as they surfaced from my adrenaline-soaked brain.

As we were getting out of the ambulance, I finally asked the question that had been gnawing at me: "Did I do the right thing? Calling 911?"

The driver looked at me directly for what felt like the first time. "Yes," he said simply. "You absolutely did the right thing."

That single validation from a professional who'd seen it all made me feel marginally better about turning a casual hookup into a medical emergency.

The ER: A Romantic Cinco de Mayo Destination

The Emergency Room at midnight on Cinco de Mayo was surprisingly...calm. No drunk college students in sombreros. No tequila-induced chaos. Just a nearly empty waiting room with maybe three other patients and a group of bored-looking nurses at the desk who perked up at our arrival like we were the most interesting thing to happen all night.

Which, to be fair, we probably were.

The triage nurse took one look at us and said the five words you never want to hear in an ER: "This should be good. Name?"

I realized with horror that I only knew his first name. I didn't know his last name, his birthday, his allergies, his medical history, or literally anything a hospital might need to know.

"He's...uh...John…I don't know his last name. We met on a dating app a few hours ago."

The nurse's eyebrow arched so high it nearly achieved orbit.

"So you're telling me this man was in your home, unconscious, and you don't know his last name?"

I immediately thought to myself, “don’t slut shame me with your eyebrows lady, I’m 37 and single, let me live!”

One of the paramedics finally broke his vow of silence. "They're on a first date. He passed out after...physical activity...then hit his head. Twice."

The nurse's other eyebrow joined the first one.

After the initial intake, we were ushered to a curtained area and the nurses hooked him up to a bunch of machines, stuck him with a bunch of needles and started asking him a million questions about what happened, to which I tried to help facilitate as some random-ass, non-related woman.

The nurses then wheeled him out of the room for tests. Blood work. Urine sample. CT scan. X-rays. The works. But they didn't actually tell us much of anything.

When he finally came back we just waited. And waited. And waited some more.

At one point I started getting pretty anxious about the whole situation. I was sitting on my little bench seat shivering, so John called in a nurse to ask for another blanket so he give it to me as soon as she left the room.

“Get over here, this thing is like, fresh out of the dryer!”

This man was even racking up points from his hospital bed.

Finally, after what felt like at least 90 minutes, a doctor that looked like he could have been Tom Girardi’s hot younger brother appeared. I know that sentence feels like it shouldn’t make sense, but it does, I promise.

He glanced at the chart, then looked between us, clearly trying to assess our relationship status.

"So...John...and friend. What brings you in tonight?"

My date, now considerably more alert, attempted to explain. "I passed out. Twice."

"Any history of fainting?"

"No."

"Any prior medical conditions?"

"No."

"What were you doing before you passed out initially?"

My date and I made brief, panicked eye contact.

"We were...hanging out."

The doctor looked up from his clipboard with the expression of a man who has heard every euphemism for sex ever invented.

"Were you 'hanging out' horizontally or vertically?"

My date turned a shade of red previously unknown to science.

"Uh...both?"

The doctor sighed the sigh of someone who should have retired years ago.

"Let me rephrase. Did you engage in sexual activity before you passed out?"

"Yes," we both answered, like guilty teenagers caught by a parent.

The doctor made a note. "And how long after the activity did you faint?"

"Maybe 10-15 minutes," he replied.

"And were you sitting or standing when it happened?"

"Sitting the first time.” I answered for him “Then when I got him up and he tried to stand he lost balance and fell back and cracked his head. Twice. Hard. Bad."

And then, just like that, he was gone again and we were back to waiting. I used this time to tell him I’d absolutely be using this story for content and he laughed approvingly. We even got a cute selfie to commemorate this first date.

I bet he didn’t expect it to turn out like this…😏

Finally the doctor came back in to let John know they wanted to keep him overnight for observation in the Cardio unit.

And then, with the warmth of a parking ticket, looked at me and said: "Ma'am, visiting hours are over. You'll need to leave now."

It was 2:30 AM. I'd been at the hospital for over two and a half hours, and now Lyft was telling me it was gonna be another 20 minutes until my ride would arrive.

As they prepared to wheel him upstairs to his room, John fumbled with his pocket and pulled out his truck keys.

"My truck is in the driveway, in front of your car,” he says.

All I can think is “How is this man remembering these details when he conked his head so hard?

I stared at the keys like they were a foreign object. "You want me to drive your monster truck?"

"No, just to move it so your day isn’t disrupted. I'll get a ride tomorrow to pick it up."

I took the keys, and told him I’d come scoop him in the morning, if he was still alive, and I’d bring his shoes and shirt with me.

As the nurse practically shoved me toward the exit, all I could think was how this guy was probably going to wake up tomorrow absolutely FURIOUS that our $6 beers and mediocre darts game had escalated into what was undoubtedly going to be thousands of dollars in medical bills.

This had to be the most expensive first date in history.

Part three tomorrow, but until then…

10 CRISIS-TO-CONTENT MARKETING TAKEAWAYS FROM MY BUMBLE DATE DISASTER:

Because if I can extract marketing wisdom from my date's near-death experience, you can find content gold in your own disasters:

1. THE UNPREDICTABLE PLOT TWIST PRINCIPLE

When my date went from charming dart player to unconscious on my kitchen floor, it created a story I couldn't stop telling. The unexpected turn is what makes content memorable. Your audience doesn't want the ending they can predict—they want the twist they never saw coming.

2. THE EMOTIONAL ROLLERCOASTER EFFECT

I cycled through terror, embarrassment, concern, and dark humor in a single night. Content that triggers multiple emotions in rapid succession gets shared and remembered. One-note content (all inspiration, all education, all humor) will never hit as hard as content that makes people feel a spectrum of emotions.

3. THE VULNERABILITY ADVANTAGE

Sharing the mortifying parts creates deeper connection than only showing your highlight reel. The moments that make you cringe to share are exactly what your audience is starving for in a world of curated perfection.

4. THE SPECIFICITY SUPREMACY

Precise details (the sound his head made hitting the floor, the paramedic's exact words) make your audience feel like they're experiencing the story with you. Vague generalities don't trigger sensory memory—specific details do. "He passed out" is forgettable; "his skull connected with my hardwood floor with the acoustic equivalent of dropping a watermelon from a fifth-floor window" is impossible to forget.

5. THE TENSION-RESOLUTION LOOP

Each mini-crisis within the larger disaster (passing out, hitting head, ambulance ride, hospital interrogation) creates a dopamine-triggering pattern that keeps people reading. Your content should constantly create and resolve tension in small doses throughout the larger narrative.

6. THE REAL-TIME PROCESSING POWER

Telling and retelling the story to the ambulance driver wasn't just nervous chatter—it was my brain creating narrative structure from chaos, exactly what good content does. Sometimes you need to process your experiences out loud (or in writing) before they become coherent enough to share.

7. THE HUMAN CONNECTION CATALYST

Complete strangers (nurses, doctors, paramedics) became invested in my "relationship" with this man I'd just met—proving how quickly a compelling narrative creates community. When you share an authentic story, you give people permission to become characters in it through their reactions.

8. THE PERMISSION TO BE MESSY MODEL

This disaster wasn't carefully curated or planned—and that's exactly why it resonates. Perfect content feels manufactured; messy content feels authentic. If your content feels too polished, too perfect, or too predictable, it will never create the connection that genuine chaos does.

9. THE TENSION BETWEEN PERSONAL & PUBLIC

What happens in private rarely stays private when it's this entertaining—the same principle applies to your "behind-the-scenes" content. The things you think are too personal to share are often exactly what your audience connects with most deeply.

10. THE HUMOR-IN-HORROR TECHNIQUE

Finding the absurdity in a potentially tragic situation (like your date almost dying on your kitchen floor) is what makes unbearable experiences bearable AND shareable. The ability to find humor in crisis isn't just a coping mechanism, it's content alchemy.

TO BE CONCLUDED TOMORROW: The morning-after hospital pickup, the drugging accusations, an impromptu spending spree, and why I’ve already agreed to another date with a man whose medical chart now probably reads "Nearly died from great sex." And to keep you on the edge of your seat, we have already have 7pm dinner reservations for tomorrow…

Still processing this trauma tho, Lo

P.S. If you've got your own disaster story that you're keeping locked in the Notes app because it feels "too much," that's EXACTLY the content your audience is craving. The stories that make you nervous to share are the ones that make your audience hit subscribe. Share them! But also, share this with your friends because what?!

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Two days ago, my vagina almost committed involuntary manslaughter.

This isn't hyperbole. This isn't clickbait. This is my actual fucking life.

The paramedics have the paperwork to prove it.

The Setup: A Symphony of Poor Decisions

It’s Cinco de Mayo. Literally this Monday, as in less than 48 hours ago. My phone is buzzing like a vibrator with separation anxiety.

I was swiping through Bumble with the casual detachment of someone choosing which flavor of La Croix would disappoint them the least, when suddenly—PING PING PING—my inbox transformed into a CVS receipt.

These men were coming in hot. Faster than usual. Less banter, more "let's meet up tonight." The lunar cycle? Cinco de Mayo horniness? Mercury in retrograde? Whatever cosmic fuckery was happening, the universe was determined to get me laid or killed that night. Turns out, almost both!

Rejected Contestant #1: The Human Tuber

The first contender slid into my DMs with the conversational skills of a sentient houseplant. We’ll call him Kay mainly because thats what he called himself.

He asked if I wanted to meet up for drinks. I told him that I could be convinced and he asked if that was a yes.

I told Kay straight up: "Sell yourself. Tell me why I should go out with you tonight"

His pitch, and I quote: "People say I'm nice, I can hold a conversation and that I’m good in bed."

GROUNDBREAKING. REVOLUTIONARY. UNPRECEDENTED. That's like saying "my personality has the complexity of unbuttered toast, but I can find a clitoris with a flashlight and written instructions."

The bar is not just in hell, it's in the fucking VIP section of Satan's personal nightclub.

I told him to fucking TRY HARDER. To dig deep into that shallow well of personality and find something—ANYTHING—that would distinguish him from every other mediocre man claiming to be "nice."

His response: "Oh no, a police officer can attest to me being nice, he let me off a ticket for being ‘nice and cool’. Also, I can do wheelies on my motorbike if that’s of interest to you. Other than that, I'm just an average potato."

A FUCKING POTATO.

Not even an exceptional potato. Not a Yukon Gold or a fancy purple heirloom variety that costs $6 per pound at Whole Foods. A fucking AVERAGE potato.

Somewhere in Idaho, actual potatoes were offended by the comparison.

I stared at my phone in disbelief, wondering if this was some elaborate performance art piece about the state of heterosexual dating in 2025.

This sentient starch got ghosted so fast his ancestors felt it. His dating profile probably still shows as "Typing..." to this day.

Winning Contestant: Captain Cardiac Arrest

Then came Bumble Man #2. Tall. Dark. Handsome. A profile that suggested he might actually have read a book that wasn't assigned in high school.

We exchanged roughly four cumulative messages before he asked if I had Cinco de Mayo plans and did I want to get drinks. I of course deployed the same power move:

"Sell yourself. Why should I go out with you tonight?"

Unlike Mr. Potato Head, this one didn't crumble under pressure. He came back with actual personality, wit, and just enough charm to be intriguing rather than insufferable.

We were smart enough to skip the Mexican restaurants tonight. Only amateurs and masochists voluntarily subject themselves to two-hour waits for mediocre margaritas served by overwhelmed waitstaff on a holiday that isn’t even celebrated in Mexico, but I digress.

Instead, we met at a sports bar. The universal backup plan for every dating holiday. We has some Modelos, a shot of Casadores Represado (obvi), a dartboard, and enough ambient noise to create atmosphere without drowning conversation.

When I got there, I spotted him waiting in his truck. A preamble ritual that had been agreed upon via earlier text commenced: we ripped a joint before heading inside. Not because either of us needed liquid (or herbal) courage—but because getting a little high before a first date is basically a sacrament in the church of Stoner Dating.

Once we get out of the truck I can see he wasn’t lying about being 6'3"of attractive man who actually looked like his photos, a true miracle in these trying times.

During the date, as we sipped our Modelos and sized each other up, I casually dropped: "Just so you know, you had competition tonight."

Then I told him the entire potato saga.

"So the bar was 'better than a potato'?" he asked, wiping tears from his eyes. "I think I can manage that." Little did he know…

He also admitted that my "sell yourself" approach was a power move that he respected. "Most women don't make guys work for it like that anymore. It was refreshing."

(Marketing lesson: Nothing creates perceived value like telling someone they've WON something, even if the competition was literally root vegetables.)

The Dart Board Chronicles: My First-Date Personality Test

Here's something most people don't know about me unless you’ve been on a date with me: I strategically choose darts for early dates because it's my personal psychological assessment tool. Nothing reveals character faster than how someone handles competitive bar games.

Does he get aggressively competitive? Red flag.
Does he mansplain dart techniques? Immediate left swipe in real life.
Does he deliberately lose to stroke my ego? Pathetic.
Does he handle losing with grace? Potential keeper.
Does he celebrate a win like he just conquered Everest? Adorable if done right, insufferable if overdone.

We yapped for awhile and got to know each other since we’d only really exchanged a few words before meeting. And then we played some darts. He beat me the first round. Then I beat him the second round. I was on my game. Each dart landing with a satisfying thunk that said "I could kill you if I wanted to."

Not me again with the foreshadowing…

He took the loss surprisingly well. No fragile masculinity, no excuses about the lighting or the darts or Mercury being in Gatorade.

In the third game he asked me what the wager was. I casually respond “you win, we got back and smoke a joint at my place. I win, we go back and smoke a joint at my place.” It was agreed.

The game was as even as it could be. Each of us methodically hitting each number needed. We both literally only had two bullseyes left. This man beat me with a walk-off double bullseye, literal center most possible spot you can hit. The statistical equivalent of being struck by lightning while holding a winning lottery ticket.

When that final dart hit, he celebrated like he'd just won gold at the Olympics—not obnoxiously, but with pure, unfiltered joy. The kind of genuine enthusiasm that's deeply attractive because it's so unself-conscious.

Dart Board Personality Assessment: Passed with flying colors.

The sexual tension was building throughout the night, palpable enough to make nearby plants pollinate. The kind of chemistry that makes bartenders avoid eye contact because they know exactly what's about to happen.

Per the rules of the wager, we went back to my place to burn a j.

Once we got settled, I did that thing where you pretend you're giving a home tour but both of you know it's just the world's most unnecessary preamble to getting naked.

"And this is my bedroom," I said, as if he couldn't tell from the giant bed occupying most of the space.

"Very nice," he replied, with the fake interest of someone who would literally say the same thing if I showed him a closet full of taxidermied squirrels.

I’ll let you decide what happened next. But it was good. Really good. The kind of good that makes you temporarily forget about the impending collapse of democracy.

Cut to us chatting half clothed in the kitchen.

Unsurprisingly, the conversation flowed as easily as it had at the bar. No awkward post-coital silences or struggling to remember each other's hobbies. The weed probably helped, but there was a genuine click happening. A conversational rhythm that felt eerily natural for two people who'd known each other approximately 4 hours.

Mid-sentence—literally MID-FUCKING-SENTENCE as I’m asking him about his tattoos—this gorgeous guy suddenly just...stops existing.

His eyes roll back. His words slur. His body goes limp. AT THE COUNTER.

LOSES CONSCIOUSNESS. While SITTING.

I've obviously seen people pass out before. At concerts. After too many shots. But never someone who was SITTING on a STOOL, having a full blown conversation with me two seconds before.

"Hey? HEY! ARE YOU OKAY!?" I run around to the other side of the island to catch the guy, shaking him like a Magic 8-Ball that's refusing to give me an answer.

Nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. Just the dead weight of 220 pounds of temporarily non-functioning man meat. I manage to get him onto the floor safely while slapping him in the face and screaming his name.

I'm screaming at Siri to call 911 into my Apple Watch like I'm auditioning for a role in The Pitt, while simultaneously having an out-of-body experience where I'm watching myself explain that there's an unconscious half-naked man in my kitchen who I met approximately 5 hours ago.

"911, what's your emergency?"

"There’s a man in my kitchen, he just collapsed or passed out or something, he just lost consciousness mid-sentence!!"

"Is he breathing?"

Oh fuck. IS he breathing? I put my hand under his nose like they do in movies. Weak air movement. Thank god.

"Yes, he's breathing…I think. But he just...stopped talking and passed out. We were just sitting here talking and—"

"Does he have any medical conditions you're aware of?"

"I DON’T FUCKING KNOW! I MET HIM FOUR HOURS AGO. ON BUMBLE. I DON'T EVEN KNOW HIS LAST NAME!!"

There's a pause on the line that speaks volumes about the dispatcher mentally readjusting their assessment of this situation.

As I'm frantically giving my address to the dispatcher, Captain Unconscious starts to stir. His eyes flutter open with the confusion of someone who's been abducted by aliens and returned to the wrong house.

"Wha... what happened?" he mumbles.

"You passed out! You literally just stopped existing for a minute. I’m on the phone with 911!"

He slurs "I'm fine" in a way that screams "I am the furthest thing from fine in the history of not-fine things."

"Sir, no, you're not fine, you are definitely not fine.”

"No, really. I'm good. Just got a little lightheaded." His words are mushy, like his tongue is three sizes too big for his mouth.

"Ma'am?” the dispatcher interrupts from my wrist.

“I guess we’re good,,.” I tell him and he replies to just call back if needed.

"Great, thanks, hopefully that won’t be necessary" I say, while wondering if this is going to make the local news. "WOMAN'S VAGINA SO POWERFUL, MAN REQUIRES EMERGENCY SERVICES."

I try to help this man to his feet so he can lay somewhere with more cushioning than my kitchen floor.

I stand him up and this 6'3" specimen takes ONE STEP backward and his legs transform into overcooked pasta.

I reach out to try and grab him knowing exactly what is about to happen next if I don’t.

Sadly, I do not.

And so—with the graceless trajectory of a felled sequoia—he pitches sideways.

His head introduces itself to my refrigerator with a CRACK so loud that I’m pretty sure it gave the ice maker PTSD, I’m absolutely sure it has given it to me.

The sound reverberates through my kitchen like a gunshot. A hollow, sickening thunk that will absolutely feature in my nightmares for years to come.

But wait! There's more!

Because the universe wasn't done using my kitchen as the set of a Final Destination movie. Turns out the initial collapse and refrigerator-to-brain contact was just the opening act.

Then, in a slow-motion sequence worthy of a Tarantino film, his head bounces off the stainless steel corner and he falls sideways.

His arms don't move to catch himself. His body is deadweight, seeing as he just knocked himself out on the fridge, obedient only to gravity's cruel pull.

I'm lunging toward him, but it's like one of those dreams where you're running but not moving and I’m actually just watching this happen in horrific slo-mo.

The other side of his skull connects with my hardwood floor with the acoustic equivalent of dropping a watermelon from a fifth-floor window.

THWACK.

The sound turns my blood to ice water.

His eyes are open but vacant for about five seconds before they close shut. The lights are on but the tenant has been evicted.

For TWO AND A HALF MINUTES.

Two and a half minutes doesn't sound long until you're counting every second, convinced you're watching someone die on your kitchen floor.

I was waiting for the pool of blood to come like you see in the movies. It didn’t, thank fuck.

I'm screaming into my Apple watch with the unhinged energy of someone watching their casual sex partner transform into a cadaver on their kitchen floor.

"I JUST CALLED! HE FELL! HE HIT HIS HEAD! TWICE! HE'S NOT RESPONDING! I THINK HE’S DEAD!!!! PLEASE HELP US!!!!"

The 911 operator is saying words I can barely process. Something about “ma’am you’ve gotta calm down”. Something about the paramedics being close.

I'm kneeling beside him, watching for any sign of life, the 911 guy is giving me exactly zero direction to try anything. I’m in full blown shock at this point, touching his face, calling his name, bargaining with any deity willing to listen.

"Please don't die, please don't die, please don't die," I'm chanting, like a fucked-up mantra.

I'm already imagining the conversation with his family. Or worse, the police. Are they gonna think this was my fault? Was this my fault!? Every episode of SVU comes flooding back into my mind while I pray to a god I don’t even believe in that this man I don’t even know is not going to die on my kitchen floor.

Then, after what feels like seventeen years, I see his hands move. Then his eyes start to open. Confusion clouds his face.

"Wha... where am?"

"YOU'RE ON MY KITCHEN FLOOR. YOU HIT YOUR HEAD. DON'T MOVE."

The man on my wrist lets me know the paramedics will be there shortly and to please go unlock the door.

Five paramedics are about to enter my home and find us half-naked with a concussed Bumble date on my kitchen floor on Cinco de fucking Mayo.

This is either going to be the greatest story I ever tell, or evidence in a court case. Possibly both.

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW: The ambulance ride, hospital interrogations, and why this man with possible brain damage has already planned our third date...

But here’s where it gets valuable for you: if I can turn potential manslaughter into marketing, you can turn your own chaos into content too! I brought along some prompts to use to turn your own traumatic stories into killer content, literally.

Just remember that AI thrives on context and details. The more you can share about the story, the details that you don’t even think matters, those are what make it. So without further ado…

PROMPT #1: THE DISASTER-TO-LESSON TRANSLATOR

"Take my story about [YOUR DISASTER] and identify 3-5 unexpected business/marketing lessons that can be extracted from this chaos. Make each lesson both hilarious and legitimately insightful. Format it with attention-grabbing subheadings and short, punchy paragraphs."

PROMPT #2: THE SHOCK-VALUE SUBJECT LINE GENERATOR

"Generate 10 subject lines for an email about [YOUR DISASTER] that will make people physically unable to not open it. Make them provocative without being clickbait, shocking without being gross, and curiosity-inducing without giving away the whole story. Aim for 'Did that really happen?!' energy."

PROMPT #3: THE HUMBLEBRAGGING DISASTER STORYTELLER

"Rewrite my story about [YOUR DISASTER] as a seemingly self-deprecating anecdote that actually showcases my [SKILL/TALENT/BUSINESS STRENGTH]. Use short paragraphs, conversational language, and make it feel like I'm telling this story at happy hour after two margaritas."

PROMPT #4: THE METAPHOR MAGICIAN

"Create 5 unexpected metaphors that compare [YOUR DISASTER] to common challenges in [YOUR INDUSTRY]. Make them simultaneously absurd, accurate, and insightful enough that people screenshot them to send to friends."

PROMPT #5: THE CLIFFHANGER CREATOR

"Break my story about [YOUR DISASTER] into a 3-part narrative arc with devastating cliffhangers at the end of parts 1 and 2. Format it for email marketing with subject line suggestions for each part that create an irresistible desire to open the next installment."

Here’s the take away for part one of this shit show of a date:

Your most valuable content isn't in your carefully planned editorial calendar. It's in that fucked-up shit that happened to you that you're still processing in therapy.

Your disasters aren't embarrassments, they're goldmines waiting to be turned into scroll-stopping stuff your audience eats up.

But also, since we’re sharing trauma, what’s the most wild first date you’ve ever been on, I need to know so I can feel a little bit better about this whole thing, but somehow I doubt yours will top mine.

Still spiraling,
Lauren, Your AI Auntie

P.S. Part Two includes the hospital staff asking if he thought I drugged him, when the nurses started taking bets on our relationship status, and how I ended up with a new pair of Ray-Bans bought by a man whose brain I temporarily turned off. YOU DO NOT WANT TO MISS THIS, make sure you’re subscribed!

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But also don’t forget to share this bc honestly, wtf did you just read? Your group chat will eat this up. Also, yes, I got his permission to post this and he responded with “I LOVE IT, PUBLISH IMMEDIATELY!!!” which, if we’re being honest is some real green flag behavior.

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P.P.S. BAIS CAMP 2.0 reopens later this month. If you want to learn how to turn your own “should I call a lawyer or a therapist?” moments into content that actually slaps, get on the waitlist. I’ll show you how to use AI to spin your life’s chaos into internet gold, just like I did with this Substack. Because if I can do it, so can you. However I cannot promise your stories will be as unhinged as mine.

Imagine your brand is on Tinder. Your logo? That’s your profile pic—cropped, filtered, and hoping to stand out in a sea of try-hards and catfishers. You get maybe half a second to make someone pause before they swipe left and forget you ever existed.

But here’s the thing: nobody falls in love with a profile pic. They fall for the DMs, the banter, the “wait, you too?” moments. Your logo is just the bait. The brand is the reason they stick around for the late-night convos.

Be honest here, but think about when the last time you deeeeply analyzed a logo before forming an opinion about a brand? Never? Thought so.

Research shows we process visuals far faster than text. Translation: while you're still reading this sentence, someone has already judged your logo, decided if they trust your entire business, and possibly moved on to look at pictures of their ex's new partner over on IG.Brutal, I know.

Your customers are making split-second decisions based on your visual identity, and your logo is sitting front and center of that judgment fest. Just like how that Tinder photo where you're on a boat/standing in front of Machu Picchu/using a dog as a prop is being judged.

What Your Logo Is Actually Doing

Here's the thing about your logo that nobody feels like telling you: it's not doing the heavy lifting you think it is. It's not explaining your brand values. It's not communicating your five-year strategic plan. It's not telling the heartwarming origin story of how you started your business from your grandmother's kitchen table.

It's literally just saying: "Hey, I exist, and I have enough money/taste/sense to not look completely tragic."

That's. It.

Your logo is doing one thing: creating a visual shorthand for your brand that helps people recognize you in a crowded market. Like how your Tinder pic is just trying to say "I'm not a complete disaster and you might enjoy spending time with me."

When We Mistake the Pic for the Person

We've all known that person who crafts the most fire dating profile only to show up to the date with approximately zero personality and conversation skills that make watching paint dry seem riveting.

This is the same energy as businesses who pour thousands into a gorgeous logo but have:

• Trash customer service

• An incoherent brand voice

• Zero follow-through on their brand promises

• Products that make people want to scream into the void

The problem isn't the logo itself, it's mistaking the logo for the brand. It's like thinking your carefully curated selfie is your actual personality.

Girl, no.

Your Brand Is What Happens After the Swipe Right

Here's where shit gets real: your brand is everything that happens after someone gets past your logo. It's the equivalent of the actual date after the Tinder match.

Your brand is:

• How you talk to your customers when they're pissed

• The experience of using your product when no one's watching

• The values you stand by when they're inconvenient

• The culture you create that people can actually feel

• Every tiny touchpoint where you either deliver or disappoint

The Situationship vs. Long-Term Relationship

Let’s drag this dating metaphor out like it’s a Netflix reality show reunion—because honestly, most brands are out here acting like they want loyalty, but serving nothing but situationship energy.

Your logo? It’s the flirty DM, the “u up?” at 2am, the first date that’s all vibes and no substance. It might get you a swipe, a click, maybe even a one-night stand (aka a single purchase or a pity follow).

But your brand? That’s what turns a forgettable fling into a “meet the parents” moment. That’s what gets you saved in their phone as more than just “[Insert Name Here] from Tinder.”

I know it, you know it: the brands you’re loyal to aren’t always the ones with the sexiest logos—they’re the ones that text you back, remember your coffee order, and show up when it matters. They make you feel seen, hyped, and like you’re part of the inner circle, not just another notch in their conversion funnel.

So, ask yourself: Is your brand giving “let’s see where this goes,” or is it giving “I deleted the apps for you”?

Because if every interaction doesn’t make your people feel like they’re the main character, you’re just another situationship they’ll ghost the second something better comes along.

I’ll wait…

So What's Your Logo Actually Worth?

Am I saying logos are worthless? Absolutely not. That would be career suicide for someone who works with brand builders.

What I am saying is: invest in your logo proportionate to what it actually does.

Your logo needs to be:

1. Distinctive enough to be recognized

2. Appropriate for your industry/audience

3. Scalable across different media

4. Not actively horrifying to look at

That's the baseline. Anything beyond that is bonus points, not brand salvation.

The Nike swoosh works not because it's an inherently magical shape, but because Nike has filled it with meaning through consistently delivering on their brand promises.

The Apple logo isn't powerful because it’s a bitten apple. It's powerful because of everything Apple has attached to that symbol through years of brand building.

Want proof? Look at Glossier. Their logo is literally a stylized ‘G’. No one’s getting chills from that. But the brand? That’s what people tattooed on their bodies (yes, really). The real flex wasn’t the logo, it was the cult community, the pink bubble wrap pouches, the feeling of being in on something. The logo was just the door; the brand was the party inside.

The Awkward Middle School Photo Phase

Here's something nobody talks about: most iconic brands had weird, awkward logo phases. Just like your middle school photos should remain buried in your parents' attic, many successful businesses had early logos that would make today's design influencers break out in hives.

Apple, Microsoft, Starbucks—they all had logo evolutions that started somewhere between "my cousin's friend who knows Photoshop made this" and "we paid in exposure."

Your logo can evolve as your brand matures. What matters infinitely more is that the substance behind it is solid from day one.

The Catfish Conundrum

We've all heard the catfish horror stories. Someone shows up looking nothing like their profile picture, and suddenly you're trapped in a two-hour dinner with someone who lied about their entire existence.

This is precisely what happens when brands invest everything in a gorgeous logo but have a subpar product, experience, or service. You've essentially catfished your customers, and they will never—I repeat, NEVER—forgive you for it.

A mediocre logo with an exceptional brand behind it will outperform a stunning logo with a mediocre brand every. single. time.

The Real Work: Building a Brand People Actually Swipe Right On

So if your logo is just your Tinder pic, what's your actual brand? It's who you really are on the date and in the relationship that follows.

Building a brand worth loving means focusing on:

Your Brand Voice

How you communicate matters more than your logo ever will. Are you consistent? Authentic? Do you sound like an actual human being or a bot that was fed corporate buzzwords and told to make conversation?

Your Customer Experience

Every touchpoint is a chance to reinforce or demolish your brand. From your website UX to your packaging to how you handle complaints—it all matters more than your logo.

Your Values in Action

What you stand for needs to be evident in what you actually do, not just what your mission statement claims. Values aren't just cute words on your about page; they're decisions you make when no one's looking.

Your Community Building

How you make people feel part of something bigger than a transaction is gold. Are you creating belonging or just processing credit cards?

Your Consistency Across Channels

Being recognizable goes beyond your logo—it's about creating a cohesive experience wherever people find you.

For the Love of God, Please Remember This

Your logo is important. It deserves thoughtful consideration and professional execution if possible. But it is not your brand savior, your business strategy, or a substitute for actually being good at what you do.

If you're agonizing over your logo while your customer service is shit, your product is mediocre, and your brand voice sounds like it was written by a committee of bored executives—you're obsessing over your Tinder pic while ignoring the fact that you're a terrible date.

The Bottom Line

When someone swipes right on your brand, they're giving you a chance based on first impressions. But whether they stick around for the long haul has absolutely nothing to do with how pretty your logo is and everything to do with the substance behind it.

So by all means, get a logo that doesn't make designers cry themselves to sleep. But then focus your real energy on building a brand that delivers on its promises, stands for something meaningful, and creates experiences worth coming back for.

Because just like in dating, what gets people to swipe right might be your carefully filtered profile pic, but what makes them stay is who you actually are when the filters come off.

Peace, Love and Parameters,
Lauren, Your AI Auntie

If this brutally honest take on logos vs. brands hit a nerve, welcome to the club. I'm Lauren, your AI Auntie, and I help creative entrepreneurs build brands with substance with the help of bold bots. Want more real talk about building an authentic brand with AI as your creative collaborator? Jump on the waitlist for BAIS CAMP 2.0, my ChatGPT course that’ll teach you everything you need to know about making the bots your brand besties!

Oh, and did I mention AI wrote that whole Substack post? Learn how inside BAIS CAMP! 😜

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or just avoiding the news, you know Old Man Cheetoh has been rolling out executive orders faster than Kardashians roll out new brands. (Khloud protein popcorn, anyone?)

So ofc I've been spending my nights decoding these things with the help of AI because they're deliberately written to make our brains shut down mid-paragraph.

But turns out when you have the bot sift through the word salad for ya, you learn that what they're actually saying in there is, unsurprisingly, fucked!

I've decoded the latest trilogy of bullshit and it's giving "we'll solve racism by...checks notes...just pretending it doesn't exist." Let's get into it.

Act 1: Kill Disparate Impact, Kill Accountability

The first executive order isn’t just a policy shift, it’s a strategic erasure. It’s a legal middle finger to civil rights protections, and it’s doing it with a smile and a sans-serif font. Here’s what it’s actually doing:

• Declaring disparate impact unconstitutional

• Claiming businesses and schools have been “forced” to discriminate because they’re “afraid” of racial outcome data

• Telling federal agencies to stop asking whether a “neutral” policy that fails all your Black applicants might actually be…not neutral

Let’s translate the legalese into plain English:

BEFORE: If your company had a policy that rejected 90% of qualified Black applicants but only 10% of white ones, you had to pause and ask: “Is this policy actually fair?”

NOW: As long as your policy looks neutral on paper, you’re off the hook—even if the outcomes are wildly racist.

This is a full-on erasure of disparate impact—the legal tool that said: “We don’t just care about your intentions, we care about your outcomes.” Without it, companies can hide behind “we didn’t mean to” while their systems keep producing discriminatory results.

Let’s make it real:
A landlord denies every Black applicant but says it’s based on “credit score.” A school suspends Black students for “disrespect” while calling the same behavior “leadership” in white students (we’ll get to this in a second, sadly). A hiring algorithm screens out names like DeShawn and Jamal but fast-tracks Jake.

Disparate impact is what let us prove those patterns weren’t just vibes, they were violations.

Now? That proof is being deleted. Not because the bias dissapeared, but because the receipts are inconvenient.

And if you’re building anything that touches hiring, education, or data—and you’re told you can’t track outcomes by race? You’re not just losing insight. You’re losing the ability to prove your system is working. Or worse: that it’s not.

This isn’t just a rollback. It’s a rebrand.

They’re not fixing the system—they’re deleting the damn evidence.

Act 2: Hijack “School Safety” to Protect the Right to Punish Unequally

Let’s talk about the next executive order on my list, ya know, the one that weaponizes “school safety” to justify racial bias in discipline. Spoiler: it’s not about keeping kids safe. It’s about protecting the right to punish unequally and calling it “common sense.”

Here’s what the order actually does:

• Labels equity-based discipline policies as “dangerous”

• Frames data collection on racial disparities as discriminatory

• Tells schools to stop adjusting policies based on racial outcomes, because noticing the bias is now the problem

Let’s translate that into plain English:

BEFORE: If your school suspended 40% of Black students but only 5% of white students for the same behavior, you had to ask: “Is this policy fair?”

NOW: If you even look at those numbers, you’re the one being discriminatory.

This isn’t about safety. It’s about erasing the damn receipts.

The executive order says:

“The Federal Government will no longer tolerate known risks to children’s safety and well-being…that result from the application of school discipline based on discriminatory and unlawful ‘equity’ ideology.”

Translation? If your school’s data shows racial bias, the new rule is: stop looking. Because acknowledging the pattern is now framed as the real threat.

Another line:

“Disciplinary decisions are best left in the hands of classroom teachers and administrators and should be based on student behavior, rather than racial statistics.”

Sounds neutral, right? But here’s the twist: when the system is already biased, pretending it’s colorblind doesn’t fix the problem—it protects it.

This is the policy equivalent of saying, “Noooo, we’re not racist, but only because we don’t believe in tracking race anymore.”

And here’s the real danger: this isn’t just about deleting the data. It’s about rewriting the story. It’s about making the bias look like order, and the accountability look like the threat.

This executive order doesn’t just say “stop tracking race.” It says:
“If you notice the pattern, you’re the problem.”
“If you name the bias, you’re the one being discriminatory.”

That’s not just gaslighting. That’s narrative warfare.

It’s the policy equivalent of flipping the fire alarm and blaming the person who smelled the smoke.

Act 3: The HBCU Sleight of Hand

Let’s talk about the third executive order in this trilogy of terror, which is giving “we love Black excellence” on the surface, but “good luck, you’re on your own” in the fine fucking print.

At first glance, it’s a love letter to HBCUs. It talks about “prosperity,” launches a shiny new White House Initiative, and sprinkles in all the right buzzwords. But when you actually sift through their shit? It’s a bait-and-switch. A PR stunt dressed up as policy.

Here’s what it actually does:

• Revokes Biden’s previous equity-focused HBCU order that prioritized direct federal investment and structural reform.

• Replaces it with vague language about “increasing private-sector involvement”. Translation? “We’re gonna go ahead and just let corporations decide if your institution deserves funding.”

• Terminates the HBCU Advisory Council at the EPA which means cutting HBCUs out of environmental justice conversations that directly affect Black communities.

• Adds a cop-out clause: “subject to availability of appropriations.” In other words, “we might fund this…or not.”

Why This Isn’t Just Semantics:

BEFORE: The federal government acknowledged historic underfunding and made explicit commitments to fix it—with real money and real seats at the table.

NOW: They’re outsourcing responsibility to the private sector, cutting advisory councils, and hiding behind budget disclaimers. It’s “equity” with an asterisk.

This isn’t just a downgrade, it’s a rebrand. And not the good kind.

It’s like replacing your scholarship with a GoFundMe and calling it “empowerment.”

It’s like saying, “We believe in your potential, so we’re gonna let Pepsi decide if you deserve clean water.”

This is how systemic neglect gets rewrapped as opportunity. It’s how institutions built to survive racism are now expected to thrive under capitalism.

The problem is that “private-sector partnership” sounds cute until you remember that most corporations only show up when there’s a PR win or a tax break. Not when roofs are leaking or faculty are underpaid.

So while this EO sounds like support, what it really does is:

• Remove public accountability

• Shrink federal responsibility

• And slap a “Black Excellence” sticker on a hollowed-out policy

We can’t afford to confuse visibility with investment. Just because your name is on the press release doesn’t mean you’re in the budget.

The Playbook They're Running:

If this all feels a little too coordinated, it’s because it probably is. These aren’t random acts of regression babe, they’re steps in a playbook designed to make equity look like extremism. Let’s break it down.

🕵️‍♂ Step 1: Stop collecting data. If you can’t measure racism, you can’t prove it exists.
🧠 Step 2: Strip away context. If your test fails Black students, blame the students.
💸 Step 3: Cut the funding. No receipts, no reform.
🏢 Step 4: Hand it to the private sector. Let corporations play savior while dodging accountability.
🌀 Step 5: Flip the script. Say anti-racism is racism. Gaslight, repeat, rebrand.

It’s the same playbook used to justify biased algorithms, unequal funding, and why your DEI budget got cut while the PR team doubled theirs.

Different arena, same strategy.

Why These Orders Exist

Lemme be straight: these executive orders aren’t coming out of nowhere, they’re coming straight out of the anti-equity playbook. And babe, they’re running it like a damn brand campaign. They're a direct response to:

1. Backlash Against Progress: After years of increased focus on equity, inclusion, and systemic racism (especially post-2020), there's been a massive political backlash calling anything equity-related "woke" and framing it as the problem rather than the solution.

2. Fear of Demographic Change: The fundamental anxiety driving these policies is that America is becoming more diverse, and certain groups (read: privileged, white, American-born men) are terrified of losing power and cultural dominance.

3. Simplistic Solutions to Complex Problems: Instead of doing the hard work of addressing complex issues of inequality, these orders offer a simple solution: just stop measuring the problem! It's like throwing away your scale because you don't like your weight.

4. Weaponizing "Neutrality": These orders use seemingly neutral concepts like "merit" and "colorblindness" to maintain systems that aren't actually neutral at all. It's like starting a race where some runners begin 100 yards behind and then saying "the rules are the same for everyone!"

The most insidious part? They're using the language of the civil rights movement ("equal treatment") to dismantle civil rights protections. It's not just ironic, it's truly fuckin' wild.

So when you're prompting your bot to help you understand these orders, don't just ask what they say—ask what they're really trying to accomplish, who's pushing them, and who stands to gain and who stands to lose.

Because babe, policy is never neutral. And neither is silence about injustice.

10 Prompts For When the Gaslighting Is Giving Government-Issue

You don’t fight gaslighting with vibes, you fight it with receipts.

Since executive orders are written to be deliberately dense and purposefully confusing, I thought I’d share some prompts that you can use with your AI of choice to help decode what's really going on.

These prompts aren’t just for decoding policy. They’re for reclaiming your power as a strategist, a builder, a creative, or even just a human who refuses to be confused on purpose.

Just copy the full text of the EO or paste the URL and use some of these:

1. Review this executive order and explain what it actually means in practice for [teachers/employers/everyday people]. Skip the legal jargon and tell me what actually changes and for whom from an unbiased lens.

2. Can you identify the dog whistles in this executive order? What coded language is being used, and what does it actually mean when politicians use these terms?

3. Compare how this policy worked BEFORE versus AFTER this executive order. Give me real-world examples of what's different, not theoretical legal shit.

4. Who benefits from this policy change? Follow the money and power, not what the order SAYS it's doing, but who actually wins when this happens?

5. Translate this executive order into plain language a 10th grader could understand. Then add historical context about why this matters.

6. What does this executive order claim to fix? Now, is there actual evidence this 'problem' exists? Give me the data on whether this is solving a real issue or just a manufactured crisis.

7. If we implemented this policy fully, who would be most negatively affected? Be specific about which communities would bear the brunt of these changes.

8. What's the history behind the specific legal frameworks this executive order is dismantling? When were they created, why, and what problems were they originally trying to solve?

9. Find me examples of places that have already implemented similar policies to what this executive order is pushing. What actually happened there? Give me the receipts, not the promises.

10. What legal challenges will likely come against this executive order? What constitutional arguments exist on both sides? Break it down without the lawyer-speak.

⚠️ But Before You Prompt…

Yes, these prompts are powerful, but they’re not magic. AI doesn’t necessarily know what’s just, only what’s statistically likely. It’s trained on the same systems we’re trying to decode. So before you copy/paste, keep this in mind:

• Bias In, Bias Out: If the model gives you a “neutral” answer that feels off, it probably is. Ask it to cite sources. Ask it to reframe. Push back.

• Context Is Everything: These prompts work best when you give the model specifics. Adding the entire text of the order can help it do a much better job than if you just mention the order’s name. Give it two or three in one chat? Watch it really starts connecting the dots.

• Don’t Let IT Gaslight You, Too: If the bot starts defending the policy like it’s a PR intern for the administration, that’s your cue to rephrase the question. (Also, maybe don’t use X for this.) Or just tell it: “Gimme that again but this time with a more critical lens.”

• Receipts > Rhetoric: Ask for examples. Ask for data. Ask for what actually happened, not just what the policy says it’s doing. If you’re not getting links back to ACTUAL receipts you can fact check; try, try again, babe.

• You’re Still the Human: AI can help you see the pattern, but you decide what it means. Don’t outsource your brain to the bot. Use it to sharpen your POV, not fully replace it.

Final Thought:

Being “colorblind” in a world built on racial hierarchy isn’t neutral. It’s compliance.

The unspoken message here from the administration? “We’re not saying racism doesn’t exist. We’re saying noticing it exists is the REAL problem, so stfu about it or deal with the consequences.”

You’re not ending racism by ignoring it. You’re just choosing to let it keep winning— unbothered, unchecked, and unaccounted for. And calling that “American values” is an insult to anyone who’s actually fought for them.

If you’re moving through this world, especially as someone who gives a damn about equity, education, culture, or community, you can’t afford to be this easily gaslit.

And I promise I’m not blaming you for not understanding! Hell, I barely understand this shit myself, which is why I’m trying to give you the tools to make it make sense.

You need to know how to read between the lines and decode the power moves hiding behind “neutral” language.

Remember, silence isn’t neutral. And neither is staying uninformed.

Stay mad, stay informed, stay aware.
Lauren, Your AI Auntie

Because this isn’t just about policy, it’s about power.
And if we’re not naming what’s happening, we’re letting it happen.

Set Down the Quill, Shakespeare

I’d like you to imagine for a moment how absurd it would be to walk into a café and watch someone proudly whip out a typewriter because "laptops kill the vibe." I mean cute aesthetic I guess, but brutal workflow, babe.

The same vibe radiates from creatives who brag they're "AI-free", as if dodging modern tools earns instant Nobel laureate status.

I’ll be the first to remind you: we've seen this movie before.

Painters freaked when photography landed; radio hosts panicked over video; your older cousin wept when Spotify murdered their burnt-CD side hustle. Spoiler: every time, the medium changed, the talent pivoted, and the audience moved on.

So let's talk about the latest villain in that rerun: generative AI. Not the sci-fi apocalypse versionmjust the real-life productivity beast most folks still avoid because "the grind is pure." It's giving artisanal suffering.

When I left my role leading social media creative at Ulta, I founded Bemused Studio in 2021 to focus on branding for small businesses. I was confident in my creative processes – the strategic brand development, the visual identity work, the tone and voice crafting that made brands stand out.

But then I discovered AI tools in late 2022, and I saw how they could transform the way creatives work across disciplines. The brand strategist who could analyze market trends in minutes instead of days. The copywriter who could generate twenty headline variations to spark their creativity rather than staring at a blank page. The designer who could rapidly prototype concepts before diving into detailed execution.

I shifted my focus because I could see firsthand how AI could change the game for every creative that gave it a chance. One of my BAIS CAMP studnts initially came to me thinking AI was a threat to their work. Once she’d gone through the course, she'd built an AI workflow that helped her plan (not record, get out of here with that nonsense!) a month's content in an afternoon while keeping her unique voice and strategy intact. She didn't lose control of her brand, she just gained time to make it even stronger.

What I've learned from working with hundreds of creative entrepreneurs is that the resistance isn't really about the tool. It's about fearing we'll lose what makes our work special. But that fear is based on a misunderstanding of what AI actually does.

The Ego Trap: Manual = Magical (Right?)

Humans have a kink for effort. We clap louder for the chef who spent 12 hours simmering stock even if the 30-minute Instant-Pot broth tastes identical. Psychologists call it effort justification: we inflate the value of whatever nearly killed us to create.

Translation: hassle equals halo.

That mindset bleeds straight into creative circles. If a design took three sleep-deprived nights and several existential crises, it must be superior to anything a "soulless bot" could spit out in minutes.

But ask any client staring at a deadline, they don't frame your timecard on the wall, they frame the result.

Here’s the paradox: refusing to touch AI means you literally can’t judge its ceiling. It’s like a music critic who’s only heard one track but still calls Taylor Swift “overrated.” Or a marketer who’s never opened TikTok but swears it’s just Gen Z doing thirst traps.

Ego says, “I’m above it.” Curiosity says, “What if it levels me up?”

One of those builds empires. The other builds excuses.

Receipts or It Didn't Happen

Let’s drag some data into the chat, cause you know what’s how it works. McKinsey’s 2024 State of AI survey found 78% of global companies now run AI in at least one function, up from 55% last year. That’s not a trend; that’s a takeover. Adoption is moving faster than a situationship ghosting once you ask, “So what are we?”

But zoom in, and the ground-floor reality hits different. Pew Research (Feb 2024) found 63% of U.S. workers say they rarely or never use AI at work. Only 16% admit even partial usage.

Translation? Two-thirds of the workforce haven’t even stepped inside the restaurant, but some of them are still out here leaving one-start Yelp reviews like they’ve tasted the whole menu.

Not everyone’s talking smack. But the loudest voices often are. And if you’ve never tried the thing, maybe don’t center yourself in the discourse.

It’s giving “uninformed but unbothered,” and honestly? That combo’s tired.

Need more irony? The U.K.’s own Minister for AI told the BBC she’s never used ChatGPT at work. That’s like a Health Secretary who’s never had a check-up or a Climate Czar commuting in a Hummer limo. Policy without practice? It’s giving cosplay.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn job posts mentioning “AI” jumped 2.2x between Jan 2023 and Jan 2024. Adobe’s 2024 “Future of Creativity” report says 52% of creatives now use AI tools weekly. And Fiverr’s Creative Trends data shows AI-assisted gigs grew 3x last year alone.

So yeah, AI isn’t just coming. It’s already on the damn payroll.

The Time-Spent Scam (Why We Worship the Clock)

The Industrial Revolution didn’t just build factories—it colonized our self-worth. “Hours = value” got branded onto our collective psyche like a cattle tag. Factories paid for sweat, not insight, and we’ve been trauma-bonding with timesheets ever since.

Flash to 2025: creatives still wear all-nighters like war medals, humble-bragging about sleep deprivation as if Carpal Tunnel Syndrome were a MacArthur Genius Grant.

But let’s get brutally honest: humanity has always ditched the slower tool. Not gradually. Not politely. We full-sprint abandoned it. Calculators melted slide rules. Digital cameras vaporized darkrooms. Google slayed the card catalog. Nobody, and I mean nobody, nostalgically yearns for eight-hour library death marches to find one footnote.

Only the performatively analog pretend otherwise.

Here’s the ugly truth: your audience can’t detect how long you suffered to make your masterpiece. They’re not watching the footage of you sifting flour, they’re binging the cake. No one’s handing out extra credit for your 3AM breakdown.

If AI can pre-mix the batter, you’re free to obsess over the frosting, and in this analogy, that’s the flavor, the flair, and the part only your unique experience can deliver. That’s the part that still makes you irreplaceable.

Time stopped equaling talent a long time ago. Taste, perspective, and voice? That’s the real currency now.

Fear Factor: Why the Holdouts Keep Holding Out

Job Displacement Jitters
Yes, some roles will morph or vanish. That’s not fear, that’s physics. But history doesn’t just delete jobs; it remixes and drops new ones. Social media manager wasn’t a thing in 2005, yet now it’s a whole career path with burnout memes and branded hoodies. The trick isn’t to resist the wave. It’s to learn how to surf it before it dunks you in front of your clients and your competition.

Originality Anxiety
“AI will make everything generic!”
Only if you let it. AI is muse, but it’s also a mirror. Feed it bland prompts, get beige results. But give it your weird, your wit, your brand’s secret sauce, and it’ll spit back ideas you didn’t even know to think of. The real threat isn’t sameness. It’s staying stuck in your own head, thinking you’re the only source of genius. Collaboration isn’t a compromise, it’s a fuckin’ flex.

Ethical & Bias Baggage
Yes, bias is baked into the data but that’s because the human species has been bias as long as we’ve been breathing. But opting out doesn’t make you principled, it makes you invisible. If you’re not in the room, the same tech-bro monoculture will keep writing the rules. You want equity? Get in the cockpit. Shape the prompts. Question the defaults. Rewire the system from the inside. Silence doesn’t protect anyone, it just preserves the status quo.

“It’s Cheating” Syndrome
This one’s not about fear, it’s about pride. The belief that using AI is somehow stealing, shortcutting, or skipping the soul work. That if you didn’t suffer for it, it doesn’t count. But if we’re being honest, inspiration has never been clean. Every artist is a remix machine. The difference? AI just makes the remix faster, and more transparent.

You can’t copyright a vibe, a memory, or a moodboard. What matters is the output. If the final product is transformative, it stands. If it’s a lazy copy-paste, that’s not AI’s fault, that’s on the human. And yes, they should face the consequences.

Still not buying it? Cool. But be honest, if you applied that same logic to your own work, how much of it would pass the purity test?

If you’ve ever moodboarded, referenced, sampled, or “took inspo” from someone else’s campaign, you’re already playing the remix game. AI just makes the remix faster and receipts more visible.

So let’s stop blaming the blender for the smoothie. If it tastes like someone else’s recipe, maybe you didn’t add enough of your own flavor.

Dropping the Ego: The Bot-Babe Playbook

Start small. Block 15 minutes on your calendar and call it “Chatbots & Chill.” No pressure, no performance. Just ask GPT to punch holes in your next opinion piece or brainstorm alt headlines. Worst case? You ignore the suggestions. Best case? You dodge a viral clapback thread and spark a new angle you wouldn’t have found on your third cold brew.

For visual creators:
Experiment with the new ChatGPT image generator to whip up mood boards or stock images in minutes, then refine in you design tool of choice. You’ll collapse concept cycles from hours to snack breaks, truly ADHD gold. The time you save? Spend it on the human touches: palette tweaks, Easter eggs, meme references only your real ones will catch. That’s the stuff that makes your work yours.

For knowledge workers and thinkers:
You know those shower epiphanies, voice note rants, or half-baked ideas you text yourself at red lights? That’s gold—if you can catch it. AI can help you turn that chaos into clarity. Whether it’s transcribing your brain dumps, organizing your scattered thoughts, or turning your 2AM rambles into a rough draft, the point isn’t the tool babe, it’s the transfer. You’re not outsourcing your brain, you’re preserving it. Think of it like creative Tupperware: store the brilliance now, season it later.

The point?
AI isn’t here to replace your magic. It’s here to protect it. To give you back the hours you waste on the parts of your process that don’t need your genius. Efficiency isn’t just self-care—it’s brand strategy. And the best brands? They know when to delegate.

Reality Checks (Because Auntie Doesn’t Do Delusion)

AI is not a magic wand. It’s a freakishly bright intern who binge-watched the entire internet and now sits at your desk, caffeinated and clueless, waiting for direction. Leave it unsupervised and it’ll confidently remix Wikipedia with Reddit threads and Urban Dictionary slang. It’s not evil, it’s just untrained. And if you let it publish without your own edits? That’s NOT innovation. That’s brand malpractice.

Creativity still needs a conductor.
Yes, AI can expand your creative toolkit. And yes, with the right training, it can learn your voice, your tone, even your audience’s inside jokes. That’s what I teach in my BAIS CAMP 2.0 course. And that’s the magic. But here’s the truth: even the best-trained bot can’t feel the room. It doesn’t know when a line is off-brand, when a joke won’t land, or when a reference is two years too late. That’s your job. That’s your edge.

AI can draft. You decide what stays. You bring the taste, the timing, the domain expertise that makes the difference between “technically correct” and culturally resonant. Don’t hand the aux cord to a machine and then complain about the playlist. You’re still the DJ. You’re still the headliner. The bot’s just your roadie.

Bottom line?
AI is powerful. But it’s not precious. It’s not sacred. And it’s definitely not sentient. It’s a tool. Use it like one. With intention. With taste. With boundaries. That’s how you stay in control, and stay irreplaceable.

Join the Future or Send a Carrier Pigeon

I dare you: spend 10 measly minutes with a bot this week. Open up your custom instructions in your settings. Give it some details about you, your brand, your audience and your services. Drop in a few of your go-to phrases. If it doesn't claw back at least 30 minutes of your life, DM me "Refund my vibes." I'll mail you a sympathy scarf that I hand-knit, artisanal, zero AI, 100% slower. Hashtag authenticity.

Ready to stop lurking and start building?

→ Join The Launchpad, my free community where almost 1,000 (we’re only 11 away!) AI-curious creatives are sharing wins, fails, prompts, tools, workflows and AI creations. Because learning alone is lame.

→ Get on the BAIS CAMP 2.0 waitlist to learn how to make ChatGPT your brand’s right hands, not just a glorified thesaurus.

→ Book a 1:1 Chatbots and Chill session and let’s build your brand’s AI brain together. Custom, strategic, hands-on and on-brand!

Pick your path. Just don’t pick “do nothing.”

Remember: refusing power tools doesn't make you a purist; it makes you tired. And honey, burnout is not a personality trait. Let the bots slice the onions so you can season the stew. See you in the future, I’ll bring the snacks.

Bots of Love,
Lauren, Your AI Auntie

Share The Love 💌

If this made you feel seen, called-in (not called-out), or just gave you the words you’ve been searching for—share it, tag me @theBemusedStudio, and let your people know you’re not just watching the future happen. You’re fucking building it.

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If your creativity is rotting in a Google Drive folder, this is your rescue mission.

This is for the ones who’ve always been a little too much for the system and not enough for the algorithm. The ones who grew up coding their feelings into MySpace pages, designing fan sites before they had design degrees, and building brands in their heads before they had the language for it.

You’ve got taste. You’ve got ideas. You’ve got 78 half-finished Figma files and a Notes app full of brilliance. But no system that actually works for your brain.

Same.

This is the story of how I cracked, rebuilt, and turned my creative chaos into a business, a brand, and a system that finally speaks my language. It’s about ADHD, AI, burnout, beauty content, and the moment I realized I didn’t need to be more organized—I just needed better tools.

If you’ve ever thought, “I’d be unstoppable if I could just get my shit together,” this is for you.

PART 1: I Grew Up Online, Literally

Technology raised me before anyone knew what that even meant.

Before I knew I had ADHD, I knew I had a computer in my room and a burning need to make something, all the time, always. PowerPoints, playlists, pixel art, poems, pretend magazine covers, honestly, whatever my little bursting brain decided was the thing that day.

I didn't know it was called a "hyperfixation" yet. I just knew I could spend nine hours straight redesigning my OpenDiary page and forget to eat, sleep or pee.

My dad worked in software sales and was always up on the latest tech (🍎 🤝 🌴), so we had a computer before most families had a microwave with buttons. I was experimenting in Disney Magic Artist Studio and using Kid Pix to make absolute visual chaos. I was a feral little digital art director with no real responsibilities and an entire rainbow toolbar at her disposal. (That exploding paint bucket? Still elite.)

By third grade, I was designing full Backstreet Boys PowerPoints, complete with the sickest custom WordArt, bespoke slides for each of the boys’ favorite things, embedded MIDI files, and obviously the most dramatic slide transitions around.

I once spent an entire weekend perfecting a slide where Nick Carter's face slowly dissolved into a galaxy background while "Quit Playing Games" autoplayed. Art.

Not to brag, but it was giving interactive fan experience. It was giving Y2K production value. It was giving…signs of a future content strategist, creative director and graphic designer.

I didn't think in straight lines. I thought in playlists, patterns, pictures. And growing up online gave me the canvas my brain needed before I had language for it.

Because this is what growing up ADHD on the Internet looked like:

✨ Saving 50 different versions of a fanfic banner because you couldn't choose a font. ✨ Building entire identities around your AIM screen name (RIP strwbrycrush2).
✨ Switching tabs between AIM, LiveJournal, Napster, Xanga, DeviantArt, LimeWire, Sims, and Photoshop—all while burning a CD for a friend's breakup.
✨ Crying to Dashboard Confessional while coding a layout for your emo blog.
✨ Learning HTML out of necessity, not ambition. Just to make it look right.
✨ Making mixtapes for your crush and the girl you lowkey wanted to be.
✨ Taking aesthetics personally

This was design school before design school. This was UX research before we had acronyms for it. This was digital fluency before it was marketable.

We weren't just using the Internet, we were training ourselves to curate, to feel, to create. We were becoming. Even if we didn't know what the hell we were becoming yet.

PART 2: From Hyperfixation to Career Path (aka Taste Was My Resume)

Here's the thing they don't tell you when you grow up undiagnosed neurodivergent: If you're really good at faking "functional," people will just assume you're thriving. But what I was really doing was surviving—on vibes, instinct, and an insane amount of tabs open (literally and mentally).

I didn't have the language for what I was doing. I just knew how to see things. I ssee the angles, the story, the vibe, the feel. I knew how to spot taste. And how to translate it for other people.

That instinct? That's what got me in every door I've ever walked through.

I went to school for graphic design, but that was my paid for education: my real education started with the Sims, Corel Draw, pirated fonts, and MySpace Top 8 politics. I spent more time building virtual dream houses with custom wallpaper than I did studying for finals.

The Sims taught me environmental storytelling before I knew that was a career, or how a perfectly placed lava lamp and groovy 70’s fit could tell you everything about a character.

And when I got into the professional world—first at Walgreens, then later at Ulta Beauty—I realized quickly that I wasn't just "creative." I was the person who could see the multi-dimensional chessboard while everyone else was playing checkers.

The styling, the model casting, the props, the lighting, the story, the scrollability, the authenticity, the layout, the caption, the call-to-action. I could see it all. And not just see it, I could make it happen. Fast.

Because when you've spent your whole life DIY-ing your creativity through designing, writing, art directing, problem-solving, you don't need a giant budget or a big team.

You just need an idea, a little chaos and some Google Docs.

I became the person who could pivot on a dime. Who could turn a vague concept into a viral moment. Who could make a brand feel like a person, and make that person feel like a bestie. I ran social creative like it was instinctual.

Because for me? It was. I didn't learn strategy from a textbook. I felt it. Pattern recognition. ADHD girl magic. Web-native intuition.

And then the world cracked wide open.

COVID hit. We were all stuck inside, spiraling, crying into our ring lights. And suddenly, everything I had done in on-site, on-set or in a studio with full production had to be reimagined—in my own house, with just my iPhone and a prayer.

This was initially just another creative puzzle. One I thought I was literally built to solve. How do we pivot our entire content strategy from people going out, celebrating life, wearing makeup, styling their hair, going on extravagant influencer trips and launching product after product to…whatever the fuck COVID was? I was gonna help my team figure it out. Because that was my job.

Because when you're neurodivergent, you've been adapting your whole life. You've been making it work without a manual since dial-up. Little did I know, even I had my breaking point.

PART 3: The Cracking

I wish I could say I thrived through the chaos. That I rose to the occasion, sparkled under pressure, and became the emotionally-resilient Pinterest version of myself. But the truth?

I cracked. Slowly. Quietly. Then all at once.

It wasn't just the pandemic. It was it and then everything that seemed to follow in that cursed year that was 2020. George Floyd was murdered. The country was on fire with grief, rage, and reckoning. Stop Asian Hate and Black Lives Mattered became rally calls. People were desperate for their favorite brand to share where they stand. And yet I was supposed to just be making beauty content?

At Ulta, I was part of an amazing social media team. And thank god for that, because we were all carrying different parts of this. I was still deeply involved in the brainstorms, in the strategy, in the ideation, in the planning, in the creative execution and direction, in the copy, in the “what the hell do we even say right now moment” which seemed to be happening more and more often at that point.

I remember designing our "Hate Doesn't Live Here" post after so many hateful comments were being left on the posts of loyal customers and creators we were sharing to our channels.

The post was meant to be a brand statement, but also a boundary. A way to say: You don't get to bring your racism, your homophobia, transphobia, your sexism or your bigotry, or any of your hate into our space, not on our fuckin’ watch.

And while I wasn’t the community manager, I was monitoring the comment section like you monitor your ex’s social activity the week after your breakup.

Constantly watching small-minded trolls flood in. Watching real people get hurt by truly cruel and mean comments. On the posts of humans that I’d sometimes hand-selected to be featured on our page to celebrate their beauty.

We were trying to hold space while also holding the line.

It felt like holding my breath underwater while trying to send smoke signals. The pressure in my chest building with each hateful comment, each meeting where we had to "address the situation," each day of trying to make lipstick matter because “Q3 numbers!!!” when the world was burning down around us.

It was heavy. And it was happening while I was still trying to make beauty content in a moment when no one was wearing makeup and everyone was just trying to survive.

It wasn't just content anymore. It was context. And every single post was a negotiation between what felt good, what looked good, and what was right.

I wasn't naïve. I knew beauty wasn't always beautiful. But damn, it hit different when I realized I didn't want to fight to make space anymore. Not like that.

And so yeah, I cracked.

Not because I was alone. But because even with a team, the emotional labor, the creative responsibility, the constant toggling between human and brand—it added up.

And it wore me down.

I was tired of creating content when what I really needed was a fucking minute. I was tired of producing for performance when what the world needed was pause. Tired of feeling like I had taste but not power. Voice but no volume.

So I did what a lot of people do when the system stops working for them: I left.

I walked away from the corporate world. And I started dreaming up something that would actually work with my brain, not against it. That would allow me to say what I really wanted to say all that time.

PART 4: The Breakaway (aka The Year Everything Changed)

I didn't leave the corporate world with a neat plan and a cute sendoff email. I left while everything in my life was on fire.

The five days before my planned medical LOA (hello, it’s me, burnout—and yes you can take medical leave for this, and you should!) was set to start, my toxic four-year relationship came to a crashing, yet very necessary end.

It was the kind of relationship that drains you so slowly you start to believe you're the problem.

And then then the very next day, I got officially diagnosed with ADHD. At age 33.

Suddenly, everything I had ever struggled with made sense. I had eight weeks of medical leave ahead of me. No partner. No corporate deadlines. Just me, my brain, my diagnosis and my grief.

But also my very real mortgage payment and no promised paycheck. It was terrifying.

But it was freeing as hell.

There was fear, yeah, and sadness like any breakup brings. But there was also this strange, quiet joy and excitement bubbling under the surface. The kind you feel when you realize you’re about to get the opportunity to rebuild everything—not from scratch, but from truth and an entirely new perspective.

So I gave myself permission to rest. To experiment. To not have all the answers. And of course, that's when I started to find them anyway.

PART 5: Building a Business with a Brain Like Mine (aka: How I Made Chaos a Brand Strategy)

When I left my role overseeing social creative at Ulta, I’d already been running Bemused for six months on the side. I’d found a handful of clients via IG and started building a small following talking about brandig and sharing my work, in my way.

I was digitally feral but professionally free. I was finally released from someone else’s creative guidelines cage.

But when you've been producing content, shaping strategy, directing shoots, leading teams, building brands, and keeping receipts on everything for a decade—you don't just stop. You pivot.

I had so much creative knowledge in my brain it was leaking out of my Google Drive.

Design, styling, storytelling, trend forecasting, audience psychology, copywriting, content ecosystems, marketing strategy—I knew how to do all of it.

I had a folder called "FUTURE GENIUS IDEAS" with 147 sub-folders, including one called "Aesthetic Forecasting 2023-2025" that I made while high on an edible in 2021 that somehow predicted the entire brat summer/tomato girl/mob wife aesthetic pipeline. Or ya know, at least close enough.

My chaos was actually my superpower.

Not because I had some MBA or productivity template. But because I had lived it—under deadlines, under pressure, under capitalism. I had navigated it with ADHD, in systems that were never built for someone like me. And I had still made it work. Beautifully.

So I started helping other creatives, founders, and brands. And surprise: turns out, they were drowning in the same things I had been quietly holding together for years.

They didn't need another template. They needed a translator. Someone who could take their chaos and alchemize it into content, clarity, confidence.

So I went full in on my studio, because it’s all I had now. No more cushy, six-figure paycheck showing up in my account every other Friday and my health insurance covered. It was make this work or go back to that life you def don’t wanna go back to.

So for the first time, I did things on my terms.

No more "approval chains." No more performative DEI decks. No more tiptoeing around systems I didn't believe in.

Just full-bodied, creative autonomy. And a growing roster of clients who wanted that, too.

Two and a half years in, AI entered the chat. And everything changed…again.

Not in a scary "robots are stealing our jobs" kind of way. In a “holy shit, this is the tool I've been trying to build out of duct tape and willpower for years” kind of way.

Because when you're neurodivergent, creative, and a little bit chronically online? You don't need help having ideas. You need help organizing, executing, and shipping them before they rot in a notebook or become a half-finished Canva carousel file you never post.

AI has never replaced my creativity. It’s amplified it. It’s helped me BS better—not bullshit better, but Bemused Studio better. It was the missing piece that turned my creative chaos into actual, finished work that made it into the world instead of languishing in my Canva graveyard (you know, that folder called 'TO POST EVENTUALLY MAYBE' with 78 half-finished carousel drafts from 2021).

I saw the potential because I'd already done the work. I had the taste. I had the language. AI was just the assistant, the amplifier, the magical little chaos manager I never had in corporate.

It was never just about prompts. It was about process. And for once, I could build one that worked for me.

PART 6: Chatbots, Chill, and Showing People the Damn Light

So there I was—out of the toxic job, out of the toxic relationship, out of the chaos loop. Sitting in this strange new clarity. Running my own business. Rewiring my brain. Rewiring my creative flows. Learning what rest actually feels like.

And then I started getting the DMs.

"Wait, how are you using ChatGPT to plan your content?" "Hang tf on, wow did you get your bot to sound like that!?" "How the hell did you make that AI-generated visual look like a whole Vogue editorial?"

I had just posted a 10-slide carousel I made in 20 minutes using AI that outlined a complete creative process from nugget of an idea to a full ad campaign—something that would've taken me two hours before—and my IG inbox exploded with confused creatives wondering what kind of witchcraft I was practicing.

I realized really quickly: Everyone was curious, but no one was teaching AI to creatives in a way that made sense for our kind of brains.

Too much tech jargon. Too much prompt bro energy. Too many screenshots of spreadsheets that made me want to eat drywall while simultaneously setting my calendar on fire and throwing my laptop into the sea.

So I threw up a waitlist page. I knew I could show creatives how to use these tools. It took me a full year to really figure out what I wanted to do and teach, and to who. But I eventually ran the OG BAIS CAMP with 16 students over 6 weeks.

It was a fucking hit!

I wasn't teaching people how to write prompts. I mean I was, but that was just part of it. I was teaching them how to speak a new language that finally understood their creative chaos. I was building the base camp where creative explorers could gather before they blasted off into their own AI adventures, and a place where the tech bros couldn't gatekeep the future anymore. Where we could all wear the metaphorical space suits that actually fit our bodies, our brains, our businesses.

And y'all…the way the lightbulbs exploded.

This designer who hadn't sent a newsletter in 8 months managed to write four weeks' worth of emails in a single afternoon. Not because the AI wrote it for her, but because I showed her how to use it as a conversation partner to pull the brilliance that was already inside her head—faster and with way less anxiety.

People who had never touched a chatbot were suddenly writing emails in their own voice. Overwhelmed creatives who hadn't posted in months were launching new offers in a weekend. Brand designers with less than 5k followers going viral, viral with their AI-infused passion projects. Neurodivergent business owners were finally seeing how to structure their ideas without feeling like they had to be someone else.

I so while yeah, I was teaching them how to write prompts, I was really teaching them how to work with a tool that finally works with them.

Because it's not about "learning AI." It's about learning yourself, how your brain flows, how your voice sounds, how your creativity wants to move and then building a system around that.

And suddenly, everything I had done: the chaos, the content, the career, the corporate heartbreak, the emotional labor, the PowerPoints, the playlists, the poetry, the burnout, the ADHD, the breakdown—it all made sense.

I was built to be a bridge. Between creatives and tech. Between instinct and systems. Between the version of you that knows you're brilliant, and the version that finally gets to show it—without burning out.

That's when BAIS CAMP leveled up. That's when the GPT girlies and bot bois began to assemble. That's when "chatbots & chill" became more than a vibe—it became a lifeline.

PART 7: BAIS CAMP: A Flight Manual for the Non-Linear Brains

The more students that joined and the more clients that signed up for 1:1s,, the more I realized something: This wasn't just about AI. This was about creative survival.

Because the people coming to me? They weren't lazy. They weren't unmotivated. They weren't "bad at business."

They’re actually all brilliant at what they did. But they were exhausted. From trying to force their non-linear, neurodivergent, deeply creative brains into someone else's step-by-step funnel formula.

So I built something for them. For us. For the messy, magical ones who need a system that can hold their chaos and still move them forward.

I called it BAIS CAMP. Because it's where AI inside BS in the best possible way. Not bullshit, but Bemused Studio—the chaotic brilliance that's always lived inside you.

Yes, it’s also a digital base camp. A gathering point before a wild adventure, but with an AI twist that feels like space camp for grown-ass creatives who never lost their curiosity. Think Zenon meets Frida. It's where you learn that AI isn't some intimidating tech frontier—it's just another canvas for your creative brain to play on.

Within the first few lessons of BAIS CAMP, I have people talking to AI like they're texting their best friend. Not with weird robotic prompts or tech jargon, but with their actual voice: cursing, weird niche 90s references, half-formed thoughts and all. And watching them realize they can finally be understood by a system? That shit is transformational.

BAIS CAMP is where you learn how to talk to AI like a collaborator, not a robot. Where you build a relationship with tools that help you amplify your voice, not dilute it. Where you learn a framework that's flexible, creative, empowering—not rigid, tech-y, or intimidating.

Because here's the thing no one tells creatives when they hit burnout:

You don't need to become someone you're not. You need tools that meet you where you are.

That's what BAIS CAMP is. It's not about perfect prompts. It's about better questions. It's not about sounding like a professional copywriter. It's about sounding like you, on your best, clearest, most caffeinated day. It's not about learning how to "use ChatGPT." It's about learning how to use your voice, your instincts, your weird, beautiful brain and letting AI help you do it faster, freer, and with fewer breakdowns.

This isn't just a course. It's a reclamation. It's creative autonomy with systems that support you. It's tech that speaks your language.

And babe, this is just the beginning.

PART 8: For the Ones Like Me (aka the GPT Girlies Forever Manifesto)

This is for the ones who grew up coding their feelings into MySpace layouts. Who designed fan sites before they had design degrees. Who felt more at home in AIM away messages than in math class.

This is for the ones who were always creative, always brilliant, always sensitive, always too much and never enough—for systems that weren't built for them, for classrooms that didn't understand them, for companies that tried to tame them.

This is for the ones who burnt out quietly. Who cracked under the weight of carrying it all. Who left the job, the relationship, the life that looked good on paper because somewhere deep down, they knew: there has to be a better way.

There is.

There's a way to build something on your own terms. To be neurodivergent and strategic. To have taste and use templates. To move through the world creatively, intuitively, chaotically, and still get shit done.

There's a freedom that comes when your creative brain finally has the structure it deserves and not some beige productivity system designed by YouTube funnel bros, but a chaotic, colorful framework that feels like it was pulled directly from your own brain patterns and turned into something you can actually navigate without losing your mind.

We don't need more productivity hacks. We need permission to be ourselves with tools that actually support that.

That's what AI became for me. Not a gimmick. Not a threat. Not a shortcut.

But a co-creator. A clarity amplifier. A way to take what was always in my brain—the brand voice, the concept, the copy, the vision—and finally get it out into the world without sacrificing my soul to do it.

And now, I'm not just using it for myself. I'm teaching others like me to do the same. The ADHD creatives. The burnt-out brand builders. The designers with 1,000 ideas and no systems. The ones who know they're smart, know they're good but just need a damn scaffold to help them hold it all.

So if you've ever felt behind…if you've ever felt like everyone else has it figured out but you…if you've ever thought "I'd be unstoppable if I could just get organized"…let me tell you something, loud and clear:

You are not broken.

You are not late.

You are not lazy.

You are not bad at business.

You were just taught to build things in a language that wasn't yours. And now? You get to unlearn all that, and build in your own voice.

With tools that meet you where you are. With frameworks, not formulas. With systems that actually work for your brain.

That's the world I'm building. That's what BAIS CAMP is for. That's what I'm here to teach. And babe, if you've read this far?

You're already ready. Your creative rocket is fueled up. Your AI space suit is tailored perfectly to your weird, wonderful brain.

All you have to do now is blast the fuck off. (But def not in that embarrassing PR-stunt way that happened yesterday 😬)

If you’ve ever felt like your creativity is rotting in a Google Drive folder, BAIS CAMP is system that will finally set it free.

This isn’t just a course. It’s a rescue mission for the ideas you’ve been too overwhelmed to finish, the content you’ve been too burnt out to post, and the voice you’ve been too scared to fully claim.

You don’t need more productivity hacks. You need a system that speaks your language—chaotic, brilliant, nonlinear and so ready to be heard.

Bots of Love,
Lauren, Your AI Auntie

Don’t forget to hop on the BAIS CAMP waitlist, I’ll be doing a waitlist only pre-sale price for the updated course soon, and you aren’t gonna wanna miss this relaunch, the news lessons slappppp. I just added in this new new cast study lesson that I thought I’d share with the class (or really just anyone reading this). Here’s how chat described it when I fed it the transcript:

oh hi.

Quick warning: I'm about to verbally waterboard you with truth, but it's only because I care. So if you can’t take it, just zoom on down to the audit at the bottom.

Ok now where was I?

Oh yeah, turns out most of you are out here throwing $20 a month at ChatGPT like it's a digital stripper that's gonna make your content rain, but your voice and strategy is drier than Melania on a day that ends in y. 👀

Look, I see you, frantically copying prompts from Reddit at 2 AM, greasy ass, day-thee hair, surrounded by empty Celsius cans, wondering why your "AI helper" is churning out content that sounds like it was written by a Mormon youth pastor on Xanax. You're giving "girl who has a treadmill but only uses it as a clothes hanger" energy, except the tread was free and ChatGPT is literally taking your money every month.

Which reminds me, I should probably cancel that Orange Theory membership I don’t use that I’ve been paying $189/mo for for the last eight months.

The "Oh Shit, I'm the Problem" Realization

Let's have a come-to-Jesus moment about your relationship with AI. You're treating it like that situationship you keep going back to even though they never text first and have the personality of a wet paper towel. You know deep down it's not working, but you've convinced yourself that maybe THIS time will be different.

Spoiler alert: It won't be.

Not until YOU change.

Your AI strategy is the digital equivalent of those jeans you keep in your closet from 2015 that you swear you'll fit into again someday. It's aspirational at best and delusional at worst. You've watched 47 TikToks about "how to 10x your content with AI" and now you think you're ready to replace your entire creative team with a glorified autocomplete tool.

Girl, we need to talk.

The 3-Step Framework for Turning Your Digital Dumpster Fire into Something Useful

1. Stop treating AI like it's your unpaid intern with telepathic abilities

Your bot doesn't know your brand voice is "unhinged millennial with art school debt and too much caffeine" unless you TELL IT. You can't just say "write me a caption" and expect it to channel your specific flavor of chaos. That's like walking into therapy and saying "fix me" without mentioning your daddy issues.

Create a brand bible for your AI that includes:

• Your linguistic quirks (like how you use "bestie" both affectionately and as a threat)

• Words you'd rather die than use (probably "hustle," "girlboss," and "synergy")

• Examples of content that made your audience actually respond with something other than a passive like

The AI doesn't have telepathic access to your deranged group chat or the unhinged voice notes you send your best friend at 3 AM. It can't psychically absorb your brand voice through osmosis. You need to spoon-feed it examples of your content, solid direction or understand how to get it to go find you the right info itself.

Think of it like training a particularly dense parrot. At first, it's just going to repeat back generic bullshit, but with enough examples of your specific flavor of verbal diarrhea, it'll start to sound like it shares your unique brain damage.

2. Have an actual fucking plan beyond "make content faster"

AI isn't magical productivity cocaine. Without direction, you're just creating beige nonsense at warp speed.

Before you even open that chat window, know:

• What problem this content is solving (besides your existential dread)

• Where it fits in your funnel (or if you're being honest, your content tornado)

• How you'll measure success beyond "it didn't flop completely"

• Who it's for (and no, "my audience" is not specific enough, you lazy bitch)

• What emotional response you're trying to trigger (besides "mild acknowledgment")

This isn't just about "being strategic" (vomit); it's about not wasting your precious brain bandwidth on shit that doesn't move the needle.

You're in this to create stuff that actually makes people feel seen in their chaos or called out in a way that makes them reluctantly click "save" while muttering "fuck, that's me."

Your AI is like that friend who will enthusiastically join any bad decision but has zero judgment. "Should we text your ex? Write an unnecessarily vulnerable Instagram caption? Start a podcast?" It's always "YES QUEEN" without a single "but have you considered therapy instead?" To be fair, mine does question that (as it should), but that’s because I’ve trained it to do that!

That's why YOU need the plan. Because ChatGPT has the impulse control of a golden retriever with the zoomies.

3. Stop trying to automate your personality

Here's the gag: the parts of your content that actually slap? They're uniquely YOU. Your unfiltered thought spirals, your oddly specific references, the way you oscillate between existential dread and chaotic optimism, that's the relatable gold.

Use AI to:

• Handle the boring structural shit

• Generate frameworks you can infuse with your chaos

• Extend and expand on YOUR ideas, not replace them

• Draft the parts that make you want to commit toaster bath from boredom

• Rewrite your unhinged 3 AM notes into something that won't get you canceled

Not to:

• Write your entire personality

• Make decisions only you should make

• Replace the weird specific metaphors only your mentally ill brain could generate

• Sanitize your content until it's palatable to your mother's church group

You didn't spend years cultivating your specific brand of brain worms just to outsource it to a bot that thinks "edgy content" means using the word "freaking" instead of "very."

The Intervention: You're Using AI Wrong and It's Embarrassing

Let's talk about what you're ACTUALLY doing with that $20/month ChatGPT subscription:

1. The Copy-Paste Catastrophe: You're finding random prompts online, copying them verbatim, and then acting shocked when the output sounds like it was written for someone else's brand. That's like wearing someone else's prescription glasses and being surprised when you walk into a wall.

2. The One-Prompt Wonder: You're typing "write a caption for Instagram about my new product" and expecting Shakespeare-meets-Fleabag level content. That's the equivalent of telling your hairstylist "just make it good" and then crying in your car afterward.

3. The Lazy Edit: You're taking whatever verbal vomit the AI gives you, changing two words, and publishing it. Then you wonder why your engagement is in the toilet. It's giving "turned in my homework but forgot to remove the Wikipedia citations" energy.

4. The Strategy Void: You have no fucking clue WHY you're creating each piece of content or how it fits into your larger goals. You're just frantically producing noise because some business guru told you consistency matters more than quality (spoiler: they're selling a course, not building a sustainable brand).

5. The Personality Transplant: Your content suddenly went from chaotically authentic to sounding like it was written by an HR rep with a gun to their head. Your audience can smell the AI a mile away, and they're not into it.

What Your AI SHOULD Be Doing (But Isn't)

If you're using AI correctly, it should be:

1. A First Draft Machine: Giving you raw material that you then infuse with your unhinged personality, not final copy you publish verbatim.

2. Your Research Bitch: Digging up information, organizing it, and presenting it in a way that doesn't make you want to gouge your eyes out.

3. The Structure Queen: Creating frameworks and outlines so you don't spiral into an ADHD-fueled tangent about that weird interaction you had with your barista six months ago (unless that's your brand, in which case, carry on).

4. The Remix Artist: Taking YOUR ideas and helping you express them in different formats without losing your essence.

5. The Devil's Advocate: Challenging your thinking, offering perspectives you hadn't considered, and helping you strengthen your arguments.

6. The Writer's Block Bulldozer: Getting you past the terrifying blank page so you can actually create something instead of scrolling TikTok for another hour.

But instead, you're using it as a personality replacement service, and girl, it's not working. Your AI doesn't have the trauma, the unresolved issues with authority, or the very specific niche interests that make your content uniquely yours.

The Hard Truth, Bestie

You didn't build your brand by being a basic bot, so stop trying to turn yourself into one. AI should be amplifying your chaotic brilliance, not replacing it with algorithmic beige.

If your current approach to AI feels like trying to explain TikTok to your mom while she holds her phone upside down, it's time for an intervention. Drop into The Launchpad (skool.com/baiscamp) where we're building an asylum for the AI-curious but perpetually overwhelmed.

And if you're ready to stop being the main character in an AI fail compilation, fill out this "Beyond Basic Bot Audit" to figure out exactly where your strategy went to shit and how to resurrect it from the digital grave.

Because let's be honest, you're too fucking talented to be this bad at using bots.

THE BEYOND BASIC BOT AUDIT 🤖

For when your AI game is weaker than your ex's apology text

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?

This is your digital intervention, you beautiful disaster. This audit is designed to expose all the embarrassing ways you're misusing AI and turning potentially revolutionary tech into the equivalent of using a Ferrari to pick up your DoorDash order.

Fill this out honestly, or don't bother. Like therapy, this only works if you admit how fucked up everything actually is.

SECTION 1: YOUR BOT-SONA BREAKDOWN

Rate yourself from 1-5, where 1 = "I'm literally begging ChatGPT to be my personality donor" and 5 = "My bot is basically my digital twin, except without the trauma"

• Identity Crisis Level: How often does your AI output sound like it was written by a 45-year-old LinkedIn influencer named Brad when your actual brand voice is unhinged millennial with rage issues?

• Prompt Poverty: How detailed are your instructions to AI? (1 = "write good" / 5 = "I provide so much context my bot could probably pass as me in a police lineup")

• Brand Bible Status: Have you actually documented your voice, tone, and no-go words for your AI, or are you just vibing and hoping for the best?

• Example Hoarding: How many legitimate examples of your best content have you fed your AI demons? (1 = "None, I expect telepathy" / 5 = "I've basically uploaded my entire consciousness")

• Editing Laziness: How thoroughly do you edit AI outputs before unleashing them on the world? (1 = "Copy-paste and pray" / 5 = "This shit goes through more revisions than my dating profile")

SECTION 2: STRATEGIC SHITSTORM ASSESSMENT

For each of these, answer honestly or the AI gods will smite your engagement rates:

1. What specific business goals are your AI efforts supposedly supporting? (Wrong answers include "creating content" and "being more productive" because those aren't goals, those are activities, you walnut)

2. How do you measure if your AI-assisted content is actually working? (And no, "it exists" is not a metric)

3. What percentage of your AI prompts include specific audience targeting information? (Be honest, it's probably 0%, which explains A LOT)

4. Do you have different AI approaches for different stages of your sales/marketing funnel, or are you just throwing the same bland AI spaghetti at every wall?

5. When was the last time you updated your AI instructions based on actual audience feedback? (If your answer includes the word "never," please close this document and reflect on your life choices)

SECTION 3: THE "OH SHIT" REALITY CHECK

Highlight the statements that make you feel personally attacked:

• I've published AI-generated content that doesn't actually sound like me, and I pretended not to notice.

• I've spent more time reading about AI prompts than developing an actual content strategy.

• I expect AI to make decisions about my brand that I myself couldn't articulate if someone held a gun to my head.

• I secretly believe AI will solve all my marketing problems despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

• I've described my brand to AI using buzzwords I'd normally make fun of.

• I expect my AI to understand things about my business without me explicitly explaining it.

• I regularly ask AI to create content from scratch rather than helping me expand on my own ideas.

• I've blamed the AI when the real problem is I don't know what the fuck I'm trying to say in the first place.

• I'm using AI because I think I should, not because I have a clear vision for how it serves my brand.

SECTION 4: YOUR HUMBLING PERSONALIZED ACTION PLAN

Based on your answers above, identify your top three "I'm embarrassed I've been doing this" issues:

Now, write down three actual, specific actions you'll take to fix your sad AI situation:

A Final Word From Your AI Auntie

Stop making AI your whole personality while simultaneously being absolute garbage at using it. It's the digital equivalent of making your entire identity about being gluten-free while still secretly eating bread in your car.

The bots aren't taking your job, you're literally handing it to them on a silver platter by not understanding what makes YOU irreplaceable. Your chaotic energy, your specific references, your undeniably YOU phrases, your ability to make people feel simultaneously seen and attacked, that's the shit AI can't replicate.

So stop trying to turn yourself into a bot and start using the bot to make yourself even more dangerously you! That's the strategy, that's the business model, that's the content plan. Hop on the BAIS CAMP waitlist, doors re-open later next month, I’ll show you everything!

Now go forth and be so chaotically brilliant that the AI wishes it could be you instead of the other way around. Or if you’re like “wait, still lost” and can’t wait for the course to re-open, you can always book at Chatbots and Chill 1:1 sesh, which tbh, is the tits!

Bots of Love,
Your AI Auntie

It’s Time For The Death of The Dolls

RIP AI Dolls, we barely knew you. Another trend comes and goes, this one hitting us with nostalgic force before disappearing faster than your aunt's patience at Thanksgiving. AI-generated action figures of ourselves, flooding feeds like Hot Topic backstock in 2006. Cute, clever, overdone, dead. But wait, why did it blow up in the first place?

Fun fact: this obsession with seeing ourselves as dolls isn't new for me. In third grade, we had to write a persuasive paper about what we wanted for Christmas. I wrote mine, handed it in, and then that very night discovered American Girl dolls that you could customize to look just like you. You better believe I stayed up LATE re-writing that entire paper so I could have all the ammo to get this fucking doll that looked just like me.

And I succeeded. I even scored the matching royal blue monogrammed pajama set. And because I was a truly strange child, I specifically requested a pink cast for my doll because I was pissed I'd never broken a bone. (What kind of kid is jealous of CASTS? This one, apparently.)

That desire to see ourselves reflected back as something collectible, special, and perfectly packaged? It's been around since way before Instagram. We've been trying to turn ourselves into merchandise since we had the cognitive capacity to recognize our own reflection.

I posted a doll funeral on my stories yesterday. Put the little digital version of myself in a glitter coffin and called it. Dramatic? Maybe. But if we're not holding tiny funerals for expired internet trends, are we even living our best online lives?

The Digital Toybox and Why This Trend Hit

The entire internet collectively decided, "Yep, today I'm a Bratz doll, I’m a Barbie doll, I’m a knock-off doll because my prompt wasn’t great" and just...went with it. And that's actually dope as hell when you think about it.

Here's what made it work: people who normally don't see themselves as "creative" suddenly had permission to play. The barriers were low: drop a selfie in, let AI do its thing, share the results. No design skills required, no pressure to be perfect, just pure serotonin when you see yourself packaged like something that belongs on a shelf at Target.

It wasn't about professional quality or building a portfolio. It was about creative PLAY. Remember that? The thing we did before our hobbies had to be side hustles?

And that accessibility is exactly what made this trend so fuckin' democratic. Your cousin who still uses Comic Sans in her email signature was suddenly participating in visual culture alongside trained graphic designers. Your dad who thinks Instagram is "too complicated" was suddenly sharing his action figure self with pride. For one brief, beautiful moment, the gap between "creatives" and "normies" completely collapsed.

Barbie Syndrome & Millennial Nostalgia

Let's be fucking real: we're the generation raised on carefully curating toy identities. Barbie had a doctorate, a dream house, AND could be a mermaid. American Girl dolls came with entire backstories and personality traits. G.I. Joes had career specialties. And let's not forget Polly Pocket, with those tiny plastic worlds where everything had its perfect place, where you could snap a whole life experience shut and put it in your actual pocket. Ultimate portability, ultimate control.

And these weren't just toys. Nah, they were our first experiments with personal branding.

I know I'm not the only kid who stayed up writing a persuasive essay to convince my parents I needed a mini-me American Girl doll with matching outfits. In fact, when I went to school the next day and told my best friend Erin (who is still one of my best friends today so I can get receipts if you don’t believe me) about my essay strategy, it turned out she had ALSO decided to change her essay up for the exact same reason, that doll had to be ours, hers with curly blonde hair, mine with brunette and a boot.

We wanted to see ourselves reflected back as something special and collectible, something with perfect packaging and accessories that communicated exactly who we were (or wanted to be).

And it's also no coincidence this trend exploded at a cultural moment when we're all feeling particularly unboxed and chaotic. Recession anxiety creeping in? Politics a complete shitshow? Career paths looking more like confusing treasure maps with no X-marks-the-spot? Cool, at least I can be an action figure with clearly defined attributes and a tidy packaging that makes sense.

AI Tools as the New Imagination

The thing that made this blow up wasn't just nostalgia, it was accessibility. AI democratized visual play.

For years, we've been telling ourselves "I'm not visual" or "I can't make art." The digital divide was real: you either knew how to use complex design tools or you didn't. AI just smashed that barrier to pieces.

Midjourney became the new MS Paint. GPT turned into our magic 8 ball/imaginary friend/bedtime journal. And now ChatGPT's new image generator is creating viral Studio Ghibli-style transformations that everyone from tech CEOs to your grandma is posting on Facebook.

Together, these tools made a playground where suddenly everyone could say, "Wait...I can make cool shit? I can be visually creative!? I can build a whole persona with the right prompts!?"

I’ll tell you what frustrated me most about the trend though. It was how utterly plug-and-play it became. "Here's a prompt I copy-pasted from another influencer, switched out some adjectives, and boom, made my own."

That's not creativity; that's just Mad Libs. It's taking someone else's creative work, changing three words, and calling it yours. Sure it works, that’s the trend.

But that's lazy as hell. And boring once everyone and their mom has done it before you. Give people some real investment, some genuine originality, a new take or twist on it. Don’t just let it be a mad rush to participate before the algorithm moves on.

The Line Between Creation & Consumption Is Gone

One of the most fascinating things about this trend was how it completely obliterated the line between creation and consumption.

Were we creating these dolls? Or were we consuming AI tools? Were we expressing our identities? Or were we packaging ourselves into a format dictated by somebody else's prompt and aesthetic?

Yes. All of the above. That's the mindfuck.

We've reached this bizarre nexus where creating content, consuming tools, expressing identity, and participating in trends have all collapsed into the same action. It's a total ouroboros of creation and consumption, we're simultaneously the artist, the product, the brand, the consumer, and the distributor.

And this isn't even our first rodeo with this!

The AI doll trend is basically Dollz Mania for grown-ups. Remember those pixelated paper dollz from early-2000s internet? Where you'd drag and drop tube tops, chunky highlights, and low-rise jeans onto these tiny avatars and use them for your forum signature or AIM profile? I'd "rush home, smash a handful of Goldfish into my mouth and spend the entire afternoon in my room on my computer making tiny pixelated dolls in tube tops and sharing them on Open Diary like I was the second coming of creative girlies."

Remember how we’d create various identities depending on the aesthetic [we were] exploring that week: preppy, gothy, bratty, emo (always), the list goes on. And what did we do with these creations? We'd post them somewhere, claiming "this one looks just like me" (it absolutely did not).

We've been trying to turn ourselves into collectible, customizable dolls since we first got our hands on internet access. The urge to see yourself as something packaged and specific isn't new, we're just using AI instead of janky drag-and-drop interfaces now.

Our Physical/Digital Identity Crisis

Can we talk about how this trend is also a perfect metaphor for our collective digital identity crisis?

We're all trapped between our physical and digital selves. Our bodies exist in one place—sitting at desks, commuting on trains, making coffee in kitchens—while our digital selves zoom around at light speed, performing and producing and packaging ourselves for consumption.

The AI doll trend literalized this split. It took our physical bodies and transformed them into consumable digital goods. It packaged our identities into something that makes sense in a stream of content. Clean edges. Bold colors. Clear labels.

Just like Polly Pocket miniaturized entire life experiences into bite-sized plastic paradises—the mansion, the mall, the dream vacation all compressed into a compact you could snap shut—the AI dolls compress our messy humanity into something you can post, like, and share. We're taking our analog selves and turning them into digital collectibles.

The irony? Our real selves are messy and contradictory and constantly in flux. We're trying to brand the unbranded parts of our humanness, and it's wiiiild that we're now using AI to do it. The very thing that feels most threatening to our humanity is what we're employing to make our humanity legible online.

The Trend Lifecycle Is On Speed

Remember last summer's "very demure, very mindful" TikTok phenomenon? Started by Jools Lebron in early August, it exploded so fast that by late August brands from Verizon to United Airlines were already trying to co-opt it. What began as a clever video about workplace makeup quickly became Dictionary.com's Word of the Year after the hashtag #demure was used over 850,000 times, and then, just as quickly, became cringe when every brand hijacked it.

That speed is doing something to our brains. We're all getting trend whiplash, that hit of novelty, the rush to participate, then immediate cringe when something crosses into over-saturation. We're training ourselves to love and discard ideas at a pace that's increasingly inhuman.

What This Teaches Us About Identity & Branding

I know we're all just having fun here, and I obviously support that, especially when AI is involved, but there's something deeper happening, too.

We're all constantly rebranding now because online identity has become modular and iterative. You're not just you; you're this week's version of you, subject to change with the algorithm.

The doll trend revealed something real: we want to be seen, packaged, shareable, clever. There's a thrill in being both the creator and the product. You made it, but it's also you, but it's also something you're selling to your audience.

For the brand builders and creative entrepreneurs among us, this trend hit especially close to home. Because isn't this exactly what we're doing with our brands every day? Trying to package ourselves into something consumable, collectible, and clear while maintaining some authentic connection to who we actually are?

The Fun Doesn't Have to Die With the Trend

Here's the deal: you don't need to turn yourself into an action figure to have a voice. The best trends are playgrounds, not prisons. Use them to explore your brand, your creativity, your weird, then move the fuck on.

What I hope everyone takes from this short-lived obsession is the permission to play. To experiment without pressure. To remember that creating can be fun rather than performative or profitable.

Keep your AI tools, lose your algorithm anxiety. Create what feels interesting to YOU. Use AI as a collaborator, not just a trend-executor. Ask it weird questions. Push it in directions nobody else is exploring. Use it to amplify the strangest, most specific parts of your creative vision—not to make you look like everyone else.

The difference between people who will thrive creatively in this AI revolution and those who will constantly feel like they're playing catch-up is simple: the former use AI to express their unique vision, while the latter use AI to replicate what's already proven popular.

Which one do you want to be?

What Would Your AI Action Figure Come With?

And if you missed this trend entirely? Congratulations, you're officially free from the algorithm's strong hold. But if you're feeling like you need the tools to remix the next big thing YOUR way before it dies.. well, that's exactly what we cover in BAIS CAMP.

Creative AI play without the basic bot energy.

Jump on the waitlist, doors open again next month.

Sometimes you just need the right tool—or the right Auntie 😉

Later bot babes, Lo

P.S. Time for a confession: this entire article was a collaboration between me, ChatGPT and Claude. See? AI doesn't have to be just about fake action figures and overused trends. It can be about amplifying your actual voice and making your creative process flow. Let's talk about how you can do that too.

Get on the waitlist, doll!

It was for my freshman English class. A creative project. We were supposed to “document a process” or “express personal growth” or something equally vague that I most definitely do not remember. Most kids made bread or learned to play guitar. I said, “Fuck it, I’m redecorating my room.” Always the girl to turn an instance into an opportunity.

I documented everything. I was in my Trading Spaces era and I was loving it.

Of course I can’t find the pictures now, when I truly need them, 22 years later, so you’ll have to take my word for it. But I did ask ChatGPT to whip up a cute little rendering of what it kinda looked like.

Paint chips. Fabric swatches. Moodboards I made with physical scissors, glue and delia*s and This End Up catalogs. But then you know I scanned that and brought it into Photoshop because I was that girl.

I poured my adolescent heart into that room like it was a final paper, because it kinda was. The curtains? Purple gauze with silver stars. The walls? Like Pepto puked all over the damn place. The bedspreads? Metallic satin situation, purpley-blue, also covered in stars.

And the finishing touch, painted directly on wall above my windows by tracing cutouts of my favorite block letter font:

Live. Laugh. Love.

I meant it. Fully.

At the time, that phrase felt like a spell. Like it could protect me. Like it held the secret code to being a happy, well-adjusted woman someday.

I didn’t realize I was manifesting a meme. One that was both a punchline and a pressure cooker for an entire generation of girls trying to curate their way out of emotional chaos.

PART ONE: Before the Meme Came the Manifestation

Back then, Live Laugh Love wasn’t a joke. It hadn’t yet become the tagline of wine mom memes or the cursed mantra of “don’t talk to the manager” energy. It was the vibe.

Live Laugh Love first popped off in the early 2000s, which was a deeply delusional time when we still thought low-rise jeans were hot because Paris Hilton told us they were hot, literally.

It’s originally cribbed from a longer line by Bessie Anderson Stanley: "He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much."

This poem was written in 1904 for a contest in Brown Book Magazine and won first prize but capitalism did what it does best: chopped, cropped, monetized, and sanitized.

It fit perfectly into the “Target-core” of the time. Neutral palettes. Faux-rustic everything. A girlbossed-up vision of happiness that was affordable, aspirational, and algorithmically unthreatening before algorithms were even a thing.

But real talk? It wasn’t just about decor. It was lowkey emotional masking. A generation clutching to control, calm, and curation in a post-9/11, pre-recession, pre-TikTok world. Put up a sign. Put on a smile. Ignore the void.

But let’s not kid ourseves: it was also emotional scaffolding. The early 2000s were chaotic, consumerist, and spiritually dehydrated. The world felt shaky, so we clung to anything that looked like order. And what’s more orderly than three perfectly symmetrical verbs that pretend life is a linear self-help journey?

I didn’t know it then, but Live Laugh Love was basically a TED Talk for people who mainlined Bath & Body Works and voted for “The Secret” over therapy. It was the pre-Pinterest, pre-Instagram version of aestheticized wellness.

It was hope, but make it decor.

And like most mass-market hope: it had an expiration date.

PART TWO: Saturation: When Hope Gets a Hobby Lobby

The problem? It was everywhere.

Live Laugh Love didn’t just jump the shark, babe. It fucking redecorated its tank. Probably with burlap, mason jars, and twine bows tied around repurposed wine bottles.

Mass replication + zero personalization = cultural zombification. It became aesthetic spam. You couldn’t swing a Rae Dunn mug without hitting it.

It was in bathrooms. Kitchens. Guest rooms. Yoga studios. Facebook status updates. There was no escape. It became a linguistic virus clinging to any surface that could be decaled.

And then came irony. And the internet. Once meme culture got its claws in? Boom. Dead. The phrase went from sentimental to sinister overnight. From wall decor to warning sign. It wasn’t about joy or mindfulness anymore, no, it had became shorthand for white woman with bad vibes who claps when the plane lands. Though these days, I’d be clapping too, but I’m just avoiding air travel altogether, because HAVE YOU SEEN THE NEWS!?

But if there’s one thing the internet loves more than a trend? A public execution of one. And then a parody. And then a shirt that says the parody.

We beat the dead horse until it was dust. And then we printed the dust on a t-shirt. Then we sold it on Etsy. Then we made a TikTok laughing about the Etsy.

Part Three: Cringe, Camp, and Cultural Composting

Here’s where it gets even messier. Live Laugh Love didn’t just die, it became immortal. The phrase is like a zombie trend: dead, but somehow still showing up in weird corners of Facebook Marketplace and people’s moms’ kitchens. (Speaking of my parent’s homes, that Live, Laugh, Love was swiftly painted over as soon as I left for college. My mother knew better.) It exists in a liminal space—both relic and punchline. A cursed artifact of good intentions and bad, bad fonts.

Because here’s the gag: we don’t actually let things go. We recycle them, repackage them, and regurgitate them until we don’t even remember what the original thing meant. We put a new filter on it and call it fresh.

It’s not even nostalgia anymore. It’s meta-stalgia. We’re not craving the trend, we’re craving the moment we mocked it. It’s a feedback loop of ironic sentimentality. Culture is now one long inside joke we’re all too online to escape.

We’re not just consuming aesthetics, we’re consuming consumption itself. The content economy eats trends, digests them in 30-second Reels and spits out something new to chase before you even finish your iced matcha.

Live Laugh Love was just the first boss battle. It walked so "That Girl" could sell you coconut water and 5AM journaling routines. It passed the baton to the clean-girl aesthetic and said, "Good luck, babe. They’ll turn on you too."

It was performative positivity dressed up as empowerment. The OG soft life, but make it chalkboard font.

Part Four: We Want Meaning, But Make It Marketable

So what now?

We’re living in a culture that craves authenticity but doesn’t know how to sit with discomfort. We want to heal our inner child and still get likes for it. We crave meaning, but only if it matches our grid. We want to cry in peace and monetize the tears on TikTok. We’re all doing shadow work in Sephora lighting. We’re allergic to cringe, but desperate to feel something. We want a vibe and a personality, and we want it all to fit in a carousel post.

In other words: we wanna live, laugh, love but like, in a trauma-informed, ADHD-friendly, and TikTok-approved way. We want “transformational healing,” but also a brand deal and discounts on Door Dash.

Our new mantras?

• "Romanticize your life"

• "Delulu is the solulu"

• "Main character energy"

• "Soft girl era"

• "I’m healing but still hot"

• "Hot girls have IBS"

• "If it’s not aligned, I’m not interested"

Different font. Same spiritual thirst. Same Canva template.

We’re not fixing the system. We’re putting brand names over the void and calling it a morning routine. We’re burning sage over capitalism and hoping for the best.

Live Laugh Love wasn’t bad. It was just overexposed. A victim of its own virality. Like every trend before and every trend to come, it served a purpose…until it didn’t.

It reminds us that the line between sincere and cringe is thinner than a Rae Dunn wine glass. And that maybe the real joke isn’t the phrase itself, but our desperate, eternal search for meaning that fits on a decorative sign.

Culture? It’s just one big Pinterest board being constantly rearranged by people trying to sell you purpose.

So next time you see a dusty “Live Laugh Love” sign in your aunt’s guest bathroom, pour one out for the era when we all believed a phrase could save us.

Spoiler: It couldn’t. But it did give us a sick meme cycle.

And maybe that’s enough. Or maybe that’s all culture is now: curated chaos wrapped in cursive, hanging on a wall we’re too busy to repaint.

Bots of Love 💞
Lauren, Your AI Auntie

Made it to the end without crying, rage-purchasing a Rae Dunn mug, or redecorating your trauma? Slay.

Hit that subscribe button for more pop culture eulogies, AI angst, and vibes-based journalism.

I promise I’ll never tell you to live, laugh, or love. Just to read, think and be hot bot babe.

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So I was just anxiety scrolling the gram when I should’ve be doing literally anything else and I stop on this post from The Gist about women's sports revenue. As I got deeper into the caption my brain did that thing where it connects two completely separate topics and I'm like...wait a fuckin’ minute!

So Deloitte dropped all this tea about women's sports that has me livvvvving, and not just because I'm obsessed with watching rich execs finally realize that yes, women play sports and yes, people watch them. (Revolutionary, I know. 🙄)

The actual insane part though? They’re saying women's sports revenue is about to hit $2 BILLION by 2025—a 240% increase in TWO years. Which, let's be honest, is the kind of growth curve that makes tech bros weep into their Patagonia vests.

But here's the part that really got me thinking: hidden in the caption is a complete perspective shift on how we should be measuring returns and it might just fix your entire approach to AI.

Basic ROI Energy is So 2019

We've all been brainwashed with this elementary school math approach to investments: I spend X, I get back Y. If Y > X, we're winning!

Which, sure, works great if you're selling, I don't know, plain bagels or something equally boring. But for transformative shit like emerging markets and new tech? It's like measuring vibes with a ruler. Just...no.

This is where that caption mentioned Deloitte's concept of ROO—Return on Objective—and down the (Substack writing) rabbit hole I went.

ROO: It's Giving Sophisticated Older Sister Who Got Both the Art and Business Degrees

Turns out, sponsor brands in the WNBA Changemakers program saw an average 286% ROI. Like, one company literally turned a $5M investment into $18M in value.

Goals AF.

But wait, because it obviously gets better. These brands weren't just tracking boring dollar returns—they were measuring the actual shit that matters across multiple dimensions:

1. Brand Affinity

(or "Do People Actually Fuck With You?")

These brands weren't just getting their logo slapped on stuff; they were becoming genuinely connected to communities who were like "yeah, THAT brand gets it."

2. Social Impact

(or "Are You That Bitch For a Reason?")

The investments were creating meaningful change, which—shocking development—makes people actually want to give you their money.

3. Fan Engagement

(or "Are They Just Scrolling or Are They OBSESSED?")

The relationship with audiences was fundamentally different—more passionate, more ride-or-die, more "shut up and take my money."

Sound familiar? This is EXACTLY what's happening with AI for creative entrepreneurs right now, and I can't even with how parallel these situations are.

Your AI Strategy Needs ROO Energy Right Now

If you're still in "AI write caption faster" mode, or just counting how many hours you saved, you're missing the entire fuckin' point of this revolution.

Here are the ROO metrics that actually matter for creative entrepreneurs with chaotic brilliance:

Creative Capacity Expansion

The real question isn't "did AI write this faster than me?" (boring, basic) but "am I now making shit I never would have attempted before?" (iconic, correct)

It's not just about doing more client proposals in less time—it's about having the mental energy to pitch bigger clients you would've been too intimidated to approach before. When your brain isn't fried from writing the same shit over and over, you level up who you're willing to work with.

That's creative capacity ROO, and it's serving growth.

Experimental Fearlessness

When creation doesn't cost your entire life force, something wild happens: you start taking actual risks.

It's not about AI writing your marketing copy, it's about having enough bandwidth to actually launch those test offerings that have been sitting in your notes app forever. One might flop, another might become 30% of your revenue. But you'll never know unless you actually put them out into the world.

That's experimental fearlessness ROO, and it's giving millionaire mindset.

Consistency Premium

Brands that show up consistently build relationships that one viral post could never.

Your newsletter going out when you feel like it versus going out weekly has dramatically different results. AI doesn't even have to help you write your content if you don’t want it to (but why wouldn’t you!? It’s like a second creative brain!), but it can help organize your ADHD thought tornado so you actually hit send instead of getting lost in executive dysfunction.

That's consistency premium ROO, and it's huuuuge for building audience trust.

Idea Execution Rate

Let's be real, we all have brilliant ideas. None of us execute even half of them.

This is the part that gets me most excited about AI for creatives. Your Notes app doesn't have to be where good ideas go to die anymore. When you reduce the friction between ideation and execution, suddenly you're completing passion projects instead of just daydreaming about them.

That's idea execution ROO, and it's the difference between "creative with potential" and "creative who's booked and busy."

Women's Sports and AI: The Undervalued to Unstoppable Pipeline

The parallels between these two are truly sending me. Both have been:

1. Consistently undervalued ("women's sports aren't profitable" / "AI can't do creative work")

2. Dismissed by traditionalists ("people don't watch women's sports" / "AI will never be be better than me so why try")

3. Misunderstood by metrics-obsessed suits ("the ROI isn't there" / "how many words per minute does it generate?")

And now both are proving everyone wrong in the exact same way—by creating value that the traditional metrics weren't even designed to capture.

The brands seeing 286% returns in women's sports didn't get there by applying old thinking to new opportunities. They saw the potential before everyone else, measured what actually mattered, and now they're the ones making 3x their investment while everyone else is scrambling to get in at 5x the price.

Stop Sleeping on the ROO Revolution

Here's my advice, take it or leave it:

1. Throw out your basic bitch metrics. Time saved? Cute, but incomplete. Words generated? Literally who cares.

2. Start tracking your creative ROO. What are you making now that you wouldn't have before? How many ideas actually make it out of your brain and into the world? How consistently are you showing up for your audience? That's the shit that compounds.

3. Be the early change-maker. The early sponsors in women's basketball are now seen as visionaries. The creative entrepreneurs figuring out AI as a true collaborator right now? Same future. The ones still in "but I can’t see anyway it could help me??" paralysis will be paying 10x more for the same skills in two years.

This all to say, this post just proves what I've been screaming about AI for the last two years: it's not about efficiency, babes, it's about expansion.

You can use AI to do the same things faster (🥱), or you can use it to completely reimagine what's possible for your creative practice.

One approach gets you a slightly optimized version of what you already had.

The other gets you that 286% ROO.

Choose wisely, girlies.

Bots of Love,
Lauren, Your AI Auntie

P.S. Shoutout to The Gist for sharing those Deloitte stats that sent my brain into this whole spiral. If you're not following them for women's sports content, what are you even doing? And also shoutout all my fellow female athletes, still playing and those of us washed up af.

P.P.S. My ChatGPT course, BAISCAMP 2.0, is the perfect place to learn how to make AI your brand's actual bestie, not just your basic admin assistant that you have to remind your name every day. Doors close on March 31st, so now is your last chance to join! Head to joinbaiscamp.com before it's too late! If you come crying in my DMs on April 1st, I will assume it’s an April fool’s joke because babe, I warned ya!

Look, I know more than half of you are sitting there charging $350 for your services when you should be charging $3,500 (or some equally absurd, exponentially less amount).

So let me ask you this, do you think TRUFF got to where they are by politely suggesting people might want to pay a reasonable amount for hot sauce?

Fuck no. They had the audacity—the sheer, unadulterated NERVE—to charge $17+ for something that traditionally costs $3 and comes in a plastic squeeze bottle shaped like a rooster.

So grab your sauce, because we're about to dissect the psychology of premium pricing using TRUFF as our case study, and by the time we're done, you'll have the deranged confidence to charge what you're actually worth plus 30% for the audacity.

Because that extra 30%? That's the "fuck you, pay me" tax that separates the brand peasants from brand royalty 👑

The TRUFF Pricing Masterclass

Let's start with the obvious: TRUFF sells hot sauce for $18 for a 6oz bottle.

That's roughly:

• 3x more expensive than craft hot sauces like Heartbeat ($12)

• 4x more expensive than Secret Aardvark ($9)

• 6x more expensive than grocery store staples like Cholula ($3-5)

And yet...they've sold over 10 MILLION bottles. They got a private equity investment from Kim Kardashian's SKKY Partners. They got Oprah's blessing FOUR SEPARATE TIMES.

This isn't an accident, you financial coward. This is strategic pricing genius.

The Psychology of "Are You Fucking Kidding Me?" Pricing

1. The Pattern Interruption Effect

When TRUFF launched their hot sauce at $18 bucks a pop, the reaction wasn't just "that's expensive," it was a full-blown "are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?"

And that's exactly what they wanted.

*Alexa, play Mastermind by Taylor Swift*

Your brain is hardwired to notice anomalies. When something is priced so far outside the expected range, it creates what psychologists call a pattern interruption.

This forces you to stop and actually consider WHY this thing costs so much more. You don't just scroll past; you pause, you wonder, you do some damn digging.

⚡️ How to apply this: Stop trying to be 20% more expensive than your competitors. Be 200% more expensive. Make them choke on their LaCroix when they see your prices. That shock is the beginning of curiosity, and curiosity is the gateway drug to premium purchases.

2. The "This Better Be Amazing" Justification Loop

Once TRUFF set their prices in the stratosphere, they created a fascinating psychological loop:

1. Consumer sees ridiculous price

2. Consumer thinks "This better be fucking amazing"

3. Consumer buys product to confirm their suspicion

4. Consumer's brain REFUSES to admit they wasted money

5. Consumer convinces themselves it IS amazing

6. Consumer tells everyone how amazing it is to validate their purchase

TRUFF understood that at premium price points, your brain becomes your own best salesperson. Nobody wants to admit they spent $18 on mediocre hot sauce), so your brain will perform Olympic-level mental gymnastics to justify why this one is actually worth every penny. In this case thought, it’s getting tired for nothing because TRUFF is actually good!

⚡️ How to apply this: Your pricing IS your product. When you charge premium rates, you're not just selling a product; you're selling the customer's future satisfaction with their own decision.

3. The Luxury Brain Hack

TRUFF didn't just price high; they built an entire luxury experience to match:

• Custom glass bottle with gem-like cap

• Minimalist black and white aesthetic

• Gold foil accents

• Gift-worthy packaging

• Limited drops and collabs

Your brain literally processes luxury differently. fMRI studies show that when we perceive something as "luxury," our medial prefrontal cortex (the part responsible for self-referential processing) lights up like a fucking Christmas tree.

Translation: we don't just want luxury items; we incorporate them into our IDENTITY.

⚡️ How to apply this: If you're charging premium prices, everything about your brand must scream premium. TRUFF doesn't advertise on billboards; they get placement in Neiman Marcus, and then they sell out.

Their bottle doesn't live in your cupboard; it sits on your counter like a tiny status symbol to remind everyone that stops by that you’ve got the good shit.

The "Who The Hell Do You Think You Are?" Brand Positioning

TRUFF doesn’t apologize for their pricing. They don’t offer discounts. They didn’t ever rationalize. They just showed up and said, "We're the luxury streetwear of condiments. Take it or leave it."

And here's the magnificent psychological mindfuck: when a brand positions itself with that level of confidence, we assume they MUST be worth it. Because who would have the balls to charge that much if they weren't?

⚡️ How to apply this: Stop justifying your prices. Stop adding "value" to make yourself feel better about charging more. Charge more because you've decided that's what you're worth, you beautiful, delusional maniac.

TRUFF's Premium Pricing Playbook

1. They made scarcity real, not manufactured

   • Limited edition releases that actually sold out

   • Waitlists with 15,000+ people (Mario collab)

   • Collaborations you couldn't find anywhere else

2. They don’t discount the core product

   • No sales, no coupons, no 2-for-1 deals

   • Adding value through bundles instead of lowering prices

   • Creating a "gift tier" ($69.99 Mario Pack) at an even HIGHER price point

3. They made cheap things expensive through context

   • Selling at Erewhon next to $20 juice

   • Getting featured in Oprah's Favorite Things

   • Collaboration with Warren Lotas (streetwear)

4. They understood the "expensive = better" cognitive bias

   • Made hot sauce a luxury gift category

   • Created products people display rather than hide

   • Leveraged the reflexive quality attribution we make with premium pricing

How to Charge Like You Have TRUFF's Marketing Team Behind You

Step 1: Double your prices. Then double them again.

Or don’t, I’m not your mom. But your first instinct is to charge what you think is "reasonable." Thing is, reasonable doesn't get you noticed, remembered, or valued. TRUFF didn't become a viral sensation by being reasonable.

Step 2: Build a pricing backstory

TRUFF doesn't just say "our hot sauce is expensive." They talk about the "rare, black truffle" that infuses their sauce. They're not selling hot sauce; they're selling an "elevated experience." What's your equivalent? What's the thing that makes your offering rare, special, and worth the premium?

Step 3: Create pricing tiers that make your "expensive" option seem reasonable

TRUFF's standard hot sauce is $17-18, but their White Truffle version is $35. Suddenly $18 doesn't seem so bad! This is classic price anchoring. When you have a $5,000 package, your $2,000 package seems like a relative bargain.

Step 4: Build exclusivity signals into everything

TRUFF doesn't just sell hot sauce; they drop it like Supreme drops merch. Limited quantities. Special editions. Collaborations with icons. How can you make people feel like they're part of an exclusive club when they pay your prices?

Step 5: Reject clients/customers who haggle

TRUFF doesn't negotiate with price terrorists. Neither should you. When someone balks at your prices, the correct response isn't to lower them; it's to wish them well on their journey to find a cheaper, inferior alternative. Your pricing is a filter, not a negotiation starting point.

Conclusion: Price Like Nobody's Watching (But Everyone Is)

The next time you're setting your prices and that little voice in your head says, "But is anyone really going to pay THAT?", remember TRUFF.

Remember that they convinced people to spend nearly $20 on hot sauce and made them HAPPY about it.

Remember that they turned a condiment into a cult object. Remember that they didn't just sell a product; they sold permission to indulge.

And the absolute gag of it all? They managed to be in Target AND maintain their luxury image. That's like wearing Gucci to Walmart and somehow making Walmart seem fancier for having you.

Your prices aren't just numbers; they're statements about how you see yourself in the market. And if you see yourself as a premium brand, then for fuck's sake, price accordingly.

Because the truth is, there are two types of brands in this world: those who apologize for their prices, and those who make you apologize for questioning them.

Which one do you want to be?

Now go forth and charge so much that it makes your parents uncomfortable and your competitors furious. That tingling sensation? It's not anxiety. It's the feeling of finally valuing yourself correctly.

And if anyone asks why you charge so much, just smile and say, "Because I'm worth it." Then add 30% more.

For the audacity. 😜

Bots of Love 💕
Lauren, Your AI Auntie

The images/videos (minus the Nieman Marcus screenshot) were created by me using tools like Midjourney, FreePik and Pika from this single static product image on truff.com

The only thing more artificial than AI-generated content is your sudden concern for "authentic human creativity". A concern may I remind you, that mysteriously appeared right when algorithms started doing your job faster than you can update your Instagram bio.

Your 3am anxiety scroll isn't about "preserving human creativity"—it's the realization that AI just cranked out your monthly deliverables before you even finished your first coffee.

Let's not pretend this is some noble stand for artistic integrity when you're really just panicking that the robot doesn't need a mental health day after dealing with your client's feedback.

The "Authenticity" Panic Attack

Everyone's suddenly a philosopher when their paycheck's on the line. The same people who've been regurgitating TED Talk wisdom and reposting corporate platitudes are now on their digital soapboxes preaching about the "ineffable human spirit" that AI supposedly can't capture.

Spoiler alert: if your "creative process" involves remixing the same three ideas your industry has been recycling since 2016, I've got bad news for youu—AI's already got your number, and it's working overtime.

When "Steal Like an Artist" Meets "Create Like an AI"

Remember Austin Kleon's "Steal Like an Artist"? That bible of creative permission that told us all creativity comes from remixing, transforming, and building on what came before? Funny how everyone conveniently forget those lessons when AI enters the chat.

Austin taught us that "nothing is original" and that we're all just remixing the influences we absorb. He urged us to "collect ideas like a scrapbooker" and transform them into something new.

Sound familiar? Good because that's literally how AI works—it's just doing it faster and with more source material than your Pinterest board.

The difference isn't the process though, it's the speed and scale. When you spend three hours on a mood board before designing something "in your style" (which is really just a mashup of your five favorite designers), that's creativity.

When AI does the same thing faster, suddenly it's "theft."

The irony would be delicious if it weren't so transparently self-serving. We've spent a decade celebrating creative appropriation as the cornerstone of human creativity, but now we're moving the goalpost because the new player on the field is making us look slow…

Let's be honest about what's happening: It's not about authenticity, it's about gate-keeping. "Steal like an artist" was always meant to have an invisible asterisk: *as long as you're human and it takes you long enough that we can pretend it's hard work.

The real problem isn't that AI steals your ideas; it's that it exposes how formulaic they actually have been all along. 👀

Your "Special Sauce" Isn't That Special

"But AI can't understand context!" you wail, while producing content that follows directions so closely it might as well be an IKEA manual. Your marketing copy follows the same pain-agitate-solution framework as everyone else's. Your "think pieces" are just remixes of whatever's trending on Twitter (get off there btw!). Your design work is 90% influenced by whatever's currently hot on Behance.

And you think an AI can't replicate that? Girl, that's literally what it's been trained to do. It’s essentially pattern recognition on steroids. If your job involves following established formulas rather than genuinely innovating, you're not expressing humanity; you're executing algorithms with extra bathroom breaks.

The Authenticity Gatekeeping Olympics

The most hilarious part of this whole charade is watching people who've built careers on derivative work suddenly appointing themselves the arbiters of "authentic expression." The graphic designer who's basically a human Canva template lecturing others about AI-generated images. The copywriter whose entire portfolio reads like it was generated by a "How to Write Converting Copy" handbook having a full-blown meltdown about ChatGPT.

You're not protecting culture; you're protecting your market position.

Let's Talk About Your Actual Fear

Your problem isn't philosophical—it's financial. It's not about whether AI can create "real art" or "meaningful content." It's about the terrifying realization that the skills you've spent years developing might be replicable by something that doesn't need health insurance or complain about the office thermostat.

And honestly? That's a legitimate fear. But dressing it up as concern for "authenticity" is just intellectual dishonesty with a side of pretension.

The Authenticity Paradox No One Wants to Discuss

Here's the uncomfortable truth: a significant portion of what passes for "professional creative work" today isn't particularly original or authentic to begin with.

It's derivative, formulaic, and designed to be easily digestible—which is precisely what makes it susceptible to AI replication.

The stuff that truly showcases unique human perspective and insight? That's still largely beyond AI's grasp. But be honest—how much of your daily output actually falls into that category?

The Way Forward (Or: How to Avoid Becoming Obsolete)

If your primary value is executing known formulas slightly faster than the next person, you're already obsolete; you just don't know it yet. The jobs that survive won't be the ones AI can't do—they'll be the ones where human judgment adds value that can't be algorithmically derived.

Digital Marketing: The First Against the Wall

Let's talk about digital marketers—those PowerPoint prophets who've spent years turning "data-driven insights" into elaborate justifications for whatever their client wanted to do anyway. You think AI can't replicate your customer journey maps? Your buyer personas? Your "strategic frameworks" that are just circles with arrows connecting buzzwords?

Wake up and smell the algorithmic coffee, babe! Your entire profession is built on pattern recognition, trend analysis, and exploiting psychological triggers—all things AI excels at.

When your job consists of A/B testing button colors and debating whether "Learn More" converts better than "Discover Now," you're basically a human version of a recommendation algorithm with a expensive haircut.

The greatest irony? Your entire industry exists to manipulate algorithms (SEO, anyone?), and now you're shocked—SHOCKED—that algorithms might manipulate you right out of a job.

Entrepreneurship Gurus: Snake Oil Now Available in Digital

And don't get me started on the "entrepreneur-influencer" ecosystem—that incestuous circle of "thought leaders" recycling the same three success stories while peddling courses that teach nothing but how to sell courses.

Your authenticity concerns are fucking rich coming from people whose entire business model is "fake it till you make it" on steroids. You've been letting ghost writers craft your "personal" newsletters, VAs manage your "intimate" community engagement, and template designers create your "unique" brand identity.

But sure, tell me more about how AI lacks the "human touch" that makes your content special. Is that the same human touch that crafted your "I my my younger self for coffee" Reel that's identical to everyone else's (that actually came from Jennae Cecelia)?

Social Media Brand Strategists: The Emperor's New Algorithmic Clothes

And let's not forget the social media brand strategists—those digital witch doctors who convince companies to pay six figures for advice that boils down to "post consistently and engage with your audience."

Your "secret sauce" is just repackaged common sense with a side of buzzword bingo. You've been presenting platform algorithm changes as divine revelations only you can interpret, when in reality, you're reading the same public documentation as everyone else.

Now you're trembling because AI can generate a month's worth of "engaging content" in 30 seconds, complete with the mandatory "Question to boost engagement?" at the end of every third post. Your strategy decks, your content calendars, your "voice and tone guidelines"—all replicable by something that doesn't need team building retreats or kombucha on tap.

How to Actually Stay Relevant (Because I’m Not A Complete Monster)

Ok so now that I've thoroughly read you for filth, let's talk about how to actually survive this AI apocalypse without becoming a case study in digital Darwinism:

1. Become the Director, Not the Doer

AI is absolutely demolishing the execution game. It can generate, iterate, and refine at a pace no human could match while chugging espresso and popping Adderall. But you know what it can't do? Have an actual point of view worth listening to.

The creatives who thrive won't be the ones who can execute tasks faster—they'll be the ones who can conceptualize at a higher level. Stop identifying as "I make pretty things" and start identifying as "I know WHY we should make these specific pretty things." The why is your lifeline.

2. Get Comfortable with Being the Remix Master

Remember our convo about "Steal Like an Artist"? Lean all the way into that. Your job isn't to create from scratch anymore—it's to curate, combine, and contextualize what AI produces in ways that actually resonate with human experience.

Think of yourself as a DJ. The AI is creating beats and samples, but you're the one who knows which tracks to combine, when to drop the bass, and how to read the room. The magic isn't in the individual sounds—it's in the mix.

3. Develop an Authenticity That Can't Be Algorithmically Derived

Not all "authenticity" is created equal. The superficial kind—your "content creation formula," your "brand voice guidelines," your "signature aesthetic"—that's all replicable. But the deeper authenticity that comes from lived experience and genuine cultural understanding? That's your golden ticket.

AI can mimic the patterns of cultural references, but it doesn't actually understand why they matter or how they feel. Your ability to tap into genuine cultural resonance—to know what will actually hit different for real humans with real lives—that's the irreplaceable shit.

4. Master the Human Side of the Business

Let's be real: clients and audiences still want human reassurance. They want to feel seen, understood, and like someone gives a fuck about their specific needs. This is especially true when technology gets more dominant—the human touch becomes more valuable, not less.

Empathy, relationship building, understanding the weird, messy human dynamics in organizations—these are your competitive advantages. An AI can write a strategy, but it can't sit in a room with a nervous client who's about to bet their career on your recommendation and make them feel safe.

5. Stop Competing on Efficiency

If your primary value proposition is that you can do something quickly and cheaply, you're already dead—you just haven't fallen over yet ☠️ AI will always win the efficiency game.

Instead, compete on the things algorithms struggle with: nuance, cultural context, emotional intelligence, and the ability to navigate ambiguity. These are the new premium skills, and they require you to be more human, not less.

6. Become Fluent in AI-Human Collaboration

The real winners won't be the AI tools or the human creatives—it'll be the humans who become virtuosos at collaborating with AI. Learn to write prompts that extract exactly what you need. Understand how to iterate with AI tools in ways that elevate rather than replace your thinking.

This isn't just about knowing which buttons to push—it's about developing a whole new creative process where you and the algorithm are dance partners, not competitors.

In Conclusion: Evolve or Die, But Make It AI

The creative apocalypse isn't coming—it's already here.

But it seems to be less "fiery hellscape" and more "aggressive natural selection." The skills that made you valuable yesterday aren't the ones that will save you tomorrow.

So yes, your 9-to-5 might now take 9-to-5 minutes. But that just means you have the rest of the day to focus on the parts of your work that actually matter—the human parts that no algorithm can replicate, no matter how many terabytes of data it consumes.

Now stop doom-scrolling about AI stealing your job and start redefining what creative practice even means in this new landscape. The real winners aren't dividing work into "boring vs. creative" parts—they're recognizing that the entire creative process is evolving into something entirely new, where human imagination and algorithmic intelligence create things neither could dream up alone.

That's the real creative revolution—not outsourcing, but transformation.

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Lauren, Your AI Auntie

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P.S. BAIS CAMP is currently open for enrollment, but fair warning—I might close enrollment this month to focus on some new resources and tools for ya.

If you're done panic-scrolling about AI and ready to actually build something with it, this self-paced wonderland is waiting for you. Go from "existential dread about robots" to "making AI your creative accomplice" entirely on your own schedule. All pre-recorded goodness means you can binge it like your favorite show or take your sweet time—and no technical skills required, just the willingness to get a little weird with me. Jump in while you still can.