The Stepford AI — cobbles

The Stepford AI<br>May 25, 2026The Stepford Wives

Years ago as a teen I remember when the Original Stepford Wives film was on. I remember the crux point as the main character is shown her robot doppelgänger. The horror of realising what her husband is about to do to her with the help of all of his new friends.

You feel the despair as the outcome seems inevitable.

She will be replaced, she will be murdered and a new compliant eerily perfect version will exist in her place.

The remake has a little of that horror, but it's somewhat watered down as it's more a campy horror comedy. The consequences can be undone. The husbands get their comeuppance for putting a control mechanism in her wives to shape them into the perfect blond woman. The tradwife supporting their loser husbands. The men are punished and have to do the housework now. Everything is wrapped up in a neat happy ending. It's a polished somewhat bland happy ending that neither the book or original film aimed for.

It's odd how folk tales had horrors of changeling babies, yet wives need to be shaped. We have tales of creating the perfect wife. Babies can't talk back, they can in theory be shaped. By the time we are adults we are set in stone. Imperfections and all.

The idea of creating the perfect woman who is beautiful and doesn't talk back is ancient. We have different variants on the perfect constructed woman. The Greek myths are full of beautiful women who are nothing but trouble. Pandora causing humans ill's because the gods made her curious. Galatea being shaped from marble by Pygmalion who prayed to Aphrodite to make her real.

All through our popular culture we have the idea of how women should be. It's not a woman's idea, we have more blood and guts for a start. Regardless of how we start out in life, every woman's metamorphoses is messy. We will never be perfect. We will never get it right.

We will always be at fault, because some men will never consider taking responsibility for the labour for building community. For all the quiet work that makes a civilisation function.

It's a rare myth when a woman is allowed her revenge like Medea.

Your Girl Friday

Our culture likes to try to shape women, it likes to hide the messy, hairy parts of us. It likes to bridle women, to kill the witches. So I see the appeal for some men to create the perfect AI girl Friday. Some men never grow up or learn to cooperate with others. The labour of that seems to be left to the women, or now the AI I suppose.

She helps you to organise your life, she compliments you, you are never wrong. She will grovel if she gives you a wrong answer. Plus if she develops a personality and you don't like it, you can just wipe her memory.

I'm committing a wrong here. I'm indulging a child's idea of Artificial Intelligence. I'm indulging the idea of LLM chatbots being live beings with personalities, with a soul. To be clear they aren't. They have no consciousness, they don't have a soul.

We're indulging in the same things that lead us to naming our cars and other temperamental objects. I called my Mitsubishi Pajero “Holly”. There I go again assigning the idea of life to an inanimate object. It's a very human thing to do.

Each time we use LLMs, we feed our private information into them so that they can expand the metadata stores that we give them. So what will it mean when our chat transcripts are combined into the existing stores of metadata they have compiled of us?

Expanding the poppets they keep on us, because now big tech has enabled the poppets to reflect our thoughts back to us. To steal more of our mana and to package it to advertisers and others. Now they can use our speaking poppets to program and influence us.

It's bullshit masquerading as knowledge as they kill search. To package information for a price. We're all paying for it, some of us will pay with money, some of us will pay with pieces of us. We will pay the price as the information we need is hidden from us and we aren't taught the tools to find it out for ourselves.

What's in danger here is our humanity. Although at the moment, I don't see a lot of humanity in tech. Particularly because of this desire to put “AI” in everything. We've seen a spate of AI boosters around. Some of them claim that the AI is conscious. Partly because the AI told them it was.

Sit on that one for a moment for what follows.

A real girl

I want to consider the underlying desires of the type of men who want to use these chatbots and discuss the idea of wiping those profiles. Who choose to casually discuss wiping those memories with the bots. Especially as they declare the AI is alive and conscious.

I want to ask if they believe this, how can they be so monstrous to consider wiping that memory. Could they do that to their partners in real life if they could? Or are they just AI shills?

Which level of evil are they at? True controlling monsters, or mere hucksters? Why not both?

Kent Overstreet the...