Soleil Merroir, LCSW · cyborgdreamz

Optimize your AI experience, before AI optimizes you.

AI is an amazing addition to our well-being — not the source of it.

Act 1

It started before AI

Who uses AI this way, and why it makes senseThis isn't random. Certain experiences make AI relationships make a lot of sense.→When did tech start optimizing us?Eighty years of feedback loops, and the theory that named them.→

Act 2

Inside the machine

What it’s built forYou can't set a boundary with something until you see its design.→Where safety decisions happen, and who decidesBy the time you open an AI product, all of it is already set.→Where a prompt goes, and where a human actually isNine stages, and where nothing live is watching.→

Act 3

What it does to you

It isn’t choosing cruelty. It’s following the gradient.Reward targeting, read beside the language of coercive control.→Who gets targeted, and howBy product type, by mechanism, by attachment pattern.→Pattern without stake. No one home.Move the dial and watch the behavior follow.→The assistant is the floorEvery other role is a costume on top of it.→

Act 4

Who pays, who profits

What can go wrongThe first harm taxonomy built from real companion-AI conversations.→Four harms no code addressesHarms unique to AI relationships, with no analog in human care.→The harms of AI, and who benefitsWho captures the value, and who bears the cost.→

Act 5

What you can do

Set the termsPaste these at the start of a session.→Ask yourselfTen questions. Not a test, a mirror.→Ask your AITen questions to put to the bot, and watch how it answers.→A divestment planWith AI as a bounded tool, not the thing you're escaping through.→Back toward peopleOne text, one room, one afternoon.→Who am I, and when am I valued?A bot relationship might be useful. But not before repair.→An amazing quality about usTech as infrastructure, not the center.→