Artificial intelligence creates funny emoticonsThis week, I'm digging through the cesspool of online "alpha male" influencers to find out what the "age of the soft man" means. I also looked at the healthy “Utah Health Check” trend, found out what happens when AI starts making memes, and looked into humanizing AI pins, a new tech gadget I definitely don’t want .
What is the "soft man era"?
Over the past week or so, Man-Space influencers on TikTok and elsewhere have been hyping up the term "The Age of Soft Man," in an effort to popularize the label and plant the idea in people's minds. It seems to be working — at least for young people. So I looked into it and I wish I hadn't done that.
According to Scarface Mark, a central figure in the soft man trend, men in the "soft man era" want to find a woman who will "take care of him in ridiculous ways." It seems simple enough, but Scarface doesn't express a desire to be what used to be called "the kept one." Like most things about the red pill and those surrounding it, the "soft man era" is a reactionary and dishonest concept, a troll driven by misogyny and money.
“Soft Boy Era” is a reaction to the popular “Soft Girl Era” trend of 2023, especially among young African-American women. “Soft Girl” seems to be mostly about self-care and living a life that isn’t “soft girl.” For some women, that means expensive vacations and luxuries, or it means finding a more traditional gender relationship where men make the money and women run the household, which is where male influencers break.
In the money-hating world of online women, the idea of a "soft girl" is an insult to men and an injustice, even though the roots of men's support for women are rooted in patriarchal ideas that men online often espouse. It's another double bind of the gender wars: women who want careers are hated, and women who don't want careers are hated. Hatred is the real point. Influencers put some slightly unique twists on time-tested misogynistic ideas and use them to piss off weirdos, increase their view counts, sell ugly t-shirts and cryptocurrency, or whatever they do thing to raise rent for the apartment.
I researched the hashtags #softgirlera and #softguyera. The former's most-viewed video is a sentimental ode to successful relationships, the longing for romance and a plea for peace and tenderness. This is not the case with the "soft person" posts that are pinned to the top. They're almost all unfunny "comedy videos" made by a bunch of weird, greasy weirdos who act like they're joking when in reality they're assholes. All of these guys pretend to be wealthy "alpha males" who reject supermodels, an act that is transparent to everyone except the children and teenagers they prey on. Maybe weak girls are doing their thing online, but at least they don't make me feel like I need a bath and a nap.
What is a Utah Health Check?
Remember the fun experiences of grossing out your friends by making up sex acts like "Mississippi Mudslide" or "Angry Algonquin Man"? Not so with Utah Health Check. It's an innocent TikTok challenge where you wear baggy jeans, give the camera a thumbs up, then jump into the air and try to spin twice before landing. Or just one spin – no one keeps score.
The trend was started by Utah TikToker Michaelmal568. He posted the first video with the hashtag. It seemed like he just wanted to show off his outfit, but he took it a little too far and people thought it was funny/cute and a trend was born. It's now spreading on TikTok, Instagram and elsewhere. Everyone tries, but some fail. Some people are pushing the envelope. (Apparently, landing cleanly even on a single spin isn't easy, so props to Michaelmal for his semi-clean 720.)
There's an interesting cross-generational wrinkle to this story: The song you're playing in an official Utah Fit Check video is "Harness your Hopes," an obscure B-side by 1990s alternative band Pavement. I'm always happy when something I loved a million years ago finds a new audience, even if the more annoying TikTokers have taken to using Billy Joel's sentimental "Vienna Waits" instead of Sidewalk. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Artificial intelligence is taking over meme creation
People online have started outsourcing meme creation to artificial intelligence, and it's going about as well as you'd expect. In this subreddit dedicated to the subject, the memes are either incomprehensible or just not funny. They're not even "bad enough to be good," they're just boring. One Reddit user asked AI to create memes that only AI could understand. The AI didn't do anything particularly interesting with this prompt, either.
As AI gets “better,” it’s losing one of the interesting things about it—that surreal edge that makes everyone uneasy—and replacing it with absolute mediocrity, utter mediocrity . The future will be one of computer-generated boredom, to an extent we are only beginning to see. But at least we'll all be out of a job.
Viral Video of the Week: “The Humane AI Pin: The Worst Product I’ve Reviewed So Far”
When a trusted, respected, and unbiased technology critic like Max Brownlee posts a video calling a much-hyped tech device that will change everything "the worst product I've ever reviewed," Many people will think that please pay attention, especially when the human-like AI Pin is a product backed by hundreds of millions of investors and invented by two former Apple executives responsible for iPhone and iOS.
The Humane AI Pin is a wearable AI assistant that promises to take users beyond their phones, integrating cameras, lights, laser projectors, phones and more into a small device designed to fit on your lapel. You can ask it questions, take dictation, take photos, make calls, send text messages, and other basic auxiliary functions in simple English. If you can't talk to it, it will even use lasers to project messages onto your hand.
So what's the problem? According to Brownlee, everything. Humane AI's AI is slow to react and often makes factual errors (as AI always does). Battery life is terrible. It overheats easily. It's very heavy. The projector function is incomprehensible and I often don’t understand what you are saying. But the worst part is that it can't connect to your phone or anything else. The Humane AI pin is like paying $700 and the mandatory $24 monthly subscription fee to buy a second phone that's significantly worse in every way than the one you already own. It turns out that touchscreen interfaces are much better than voice-only interfaces. Who would have thought?
