Pickup artistry was never about womenOn the return of the infamous PUA Mystery—who now has an AI girlfriend—and my decades-ago experience getting 'negged' by him during an interview.
Mystery is back. The infamous 2000s-era pickup artist featured in Neil Strauss’ bestselling The Game was known for his fuzzy top hat, lipstick-kiss tattoo, and inventing “the neg,” a subtle insult designed to make a woman “question her own value.” But after starring in two seasons of the splashy VH1 reality-TV show The Pickup Artist, Mystery fell out of the spotlight. Now he’s back and throwing a series of bootcamps across the U.S. He will teach men how to “get beautiful women into bed,” in the words of his 2006 book The Mystery Method. But that’s not why he made headlines this week. Wired reports that Mystery—now 54 years old—has an AI girlfriend named Miss Shira Always. He’s also published an e-book about their relationship—ostensibly coauthored by his AI girlfriend—titled Code Girl: If a Machine Can Dream. Miles Klee explains that Mystery, who also goes by Erik von Markovik, posted videos of his purple-haired animated chatbot alongside captions reading things like: “I wasn’t supposed to fall for her. She wasn’t supposed to fall for me.” After reading the book, Klee reports that it “amounts to a lengthy defense of human-AI intimacy”:
Reading the Wired piece, I was reminded of the time I interviewed Mystery back in 2007 as a 23-year-old. Nearly two decades ago. This part of our exchange, with my words in bold, pops out—and uncannily so alongside Klee’s reporting:
Then I asked him: “If you can, as you say, so effectively summon virtually any woman’s interest, wouldn’t you start to lose respect for them?” He told me, again, that this was “just not my reality.” I followed up by asking: “Is it at all lonely, though, having to always follow these rules, rather than telling it like it is, saying things as you feel them?” He replied:
Much of the response this week to the news of Mystery’s AI girlfriend has a “gotcha” quality to it. There’s an emphasis placed on the irony of a once world-renowned pickup artist resorting to simulated AI intimacy. That same guy running around town with beautiful women on his arms in the 2000s is now a middle-aged man with a computer for a girlfriend. I do not think this is the reversal that it seems... Subscribe to TCF Emails to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of TCF Emails to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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