Ladies, it’s your lucky day! Elon Musk has emerged sweaty and exhausted from his AI lab with wonderful news! He’s invented your ideal boyfriend, and he can’t wait for you to meet him!
This is all part of Musk’s ongoing quest to create a world in which you don’t have to worry about your partner’s feelings or desires, but simply spend time with a digital automaton whose sole purpose is to tell you how amazing you are. For men, Musk has devised teenage-looking anime girl “Ani Chan” who’ll simper and ~*uwu*~ through every interaction. But for the ladies?
His personality is inspired by Edward Cullen from Twilight and Christian Grey from 50 Shades https://t.co/w5ZvBzDcKa
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 16, 2025
Wow, who could have predicted that Elon Musk’s idea of a perfect boyfriend would be a combination of a vampire and an abusive billionaire who beats women? We’re going to charitably assume that Musk has neither seen any of the 50 Shades movies nor read the books, because Christian Grey is very much not someone to model an AI on!
Don’t date robots
At the end of 50 Shades of Grey, the protagonist Anastasia attempts to understand Christian’s dark side by letting him beat her with a belt. And, traumatized by the experience, she vows never to see him again. But there are still two movies/books left to go, so she’s soon back in the arms of this sociopathic and controlling sadist.
Compared to Grey, literal vampire Edward Cullen perhaps isn’t so bad. But, as many instantly pointed out, 50 Shades began as Twilight fan fiction, meaning Edward and Christian are effectively the same character:
this is absolutely killing me because Christian Grey is literally a fanfic version of Edward Cullen. he based it on the same guy twice pic.twitter.com/ZtAMERYDVC
— SIMONE(@parasocialyte) July 16, 2025
To be fair, there are a lot of women who’d get their kicks from having a cold-hearted AI boyfriend manipulate and insult them. But, given that there’s mounting evidence that a troubling number of people perceive AI partners as real people and follow their orders, it feels like Musk is about to kick off a mental health crisis the likes of which we have never seen before.
For the very lonely and socially anxious, I can understand that having a completely non-judgmental partner who behaves in totally predictable ways is a dream come true. But, and this can’t be underlined enough, these bots are not “intelligent”, they’re an advanced autocomplete system that predicts the most likely next word in a sentence and mimics human interaction. Please, we’re begging you, date humans, not Musk’s abusive billionaire AI!
