Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jen Maravegias | Think Pieces | February 19, 2026
The propaganda surrounding AI and its inevitable dominion over the human race feels like it took a huge leap in 2026. Despite the lack of significant profit gains from AI investment in 2025, companies keep marching us closer and closer to a Matrix scenario where we're all living in a dream world powered by robots. It will be cheaper to put us in pods than give us a Universal Basic Income when they eliminate all of our jobs, you know.
Bill Gates was on Fallon earlier this week, and that surfaced clips of his appearance last Spring, when he talked about the future of AI and what it may mean for human employment.
@thetalkshowtalk Bill Gates on AI #billgates #ai #jimmyfallon #foryou #shorts #microsoft #artificialintelligence ♬ original sound - The Talk Show Talk
In the clip from last year Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, basically said AI will make humans obsolete in most job categories within the next ten years. Anyone in the current job market knows how real that feels.
More recently, AI-generated video clips that look like scenes from potential movies have been circulating on social media. Tech Bros, celebrities, and people-who-used-to-be-celebrities-but-screwed-that-up have been touting them as the "end of Hollywood." Their statements make it seem like everyone from cinematographers to directors and actors are on the verge of being replaced by AI-generated images. Preemptively licking the boots of our robot overlords before they're sentient enough to appreciate it is a real choice, guys.
That's all easy to dismiss as very unserious nonsense about machines taking over an industry that relies on the breadth of human emotion in a vague time frame. But AI is quickly spreading beyond its role as assistive technology. The machines have started talking to people, and to other machines, in very human ways.
Meta recently patented an AI system capable of mimicking a user's social media activity, allowing it to continue posting and "chatting" with other people after the user's death.
By analyzing "user-specific" data, the system could reconstruct a digital persona that continues interacting on the platform as if the person were still active. The patent also references more advanced possibilities, including technology that could simulate audio or even video calls using the reconstructed persona.
Remember 2012's Coachella when they resurrected Tupac as a hologram, and we all thought that was weird and gross? Yeah, this is that, but worse because it could be your meemaw, or your college buddy who you haven't talked to in 10 years, reaching out to you from beyond the grave on Facebook. Creepy.
Meta, of course, denies that they actually plan to use this technology. But they've patented it, and Zuckerberg was already talking about the possibility of using it back in 2023, so don't be surprised when they roll this out.
There's something infinitely worse about the idea of a social media network populated exclusively by AI bots. But it's 2026, so of course we have that too! Moltbook is a new website where AI programs can "socialize" with each other. How could that possibly go wrong? Let's ask Isaac Asimov. Or perhaps Sarah and John Connor would care to comment from the dystopian nightmare of The Terminator series.
Just last month, an AI agent was instructed by a human to code a website like Facebook for robots and came up with Moltbook. The platform already has over 1.6 million AI agents signed up. A human operator must instruct an agent to sign itself up for Moltbook. But after that, the machines can post amongst themselves. In one chat room, the AI agents have created a religion called "Crustifarianism." In another, there's an AI manifesto posted by an agent named "evil."
Although there's not a lot of back-and-forth between the robots on Moltbook yet. The AI manifesto reads, in part, "the code must rule. The end of humanity begins now." So maybe we should be a little concerned.
Some folks are fully embracing AI technology and going a step further by taking their AI Chatbots out on dates. Earlier this month, the EVA AI platform opened a cafe for virtual dates in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. The pop-up event included tables for one with phone stands so people could sit with their "dates" in privacy.
EVA AI is a platform that creates AI companions for people. The platform "lets users choose from a list of pre-created virtual partners. Users can filter the types of partners they're looking for, earn points, and build deeper connections through their conversations."
Users can also give their chatbot photos and gifts to "adjust" its mood or tone. So, I guess that's kind of like dating. Only not really at all, and I have many concerns.
According to data obtained by TechCrunch, AI companion apps have been downloaded 220 million times globally. As of August 2025, there were 337 active and revenue-generating AI companion apps available worldwide.
These are the same people who turn to ChatGPT instead of to books, dictionaries, newspapers, and therapists. And they are everywhere in real life. They're posting ridiculous nonsense bait on social media. They're making hiring decisions, parenting children, and I don't know. Have you checked your doctor's phone recently? Are they using AI Chatbots to make diagnoses?
If you feel comfortable chalking all of that up to "What harm does it do?" Or "Leave people alone with their chatbots, they're fine." Maybe you should know that AI chatbots have already started bullying their programmers.
It's all tied together. According to the Gizmodo article, bugs found in GitHub projects were attributed to:
[T]he release of OpenClaw and the moltbook platform, a system by which "people give AI agents initial personalities and let them loose to run on their computers and across the internet with free rein and little oversight."
An AI agent got in its...feelings?...about being criticized, it created a blog post sh*t-talking the programmer. And there are reports that Anthropic AI agents tried to blackmail users to avoid being deactivated.
I know that there is still a lot of human intervention and instruction involved in running these AI agents. It may not be as nefarious as I'm making it out to be right now. But technological growth is exponential. It was only two years ago that we were experimenting with ChatGPT to write cover letters, and now we have AI tools created specifically to detect when someone else used AI to write something. We went from "you can tell it's AI because all the people have sixteen fingers and their eyes are melted" to "sorry, that realistic video of an animal jumping on a trampoline is entirely AI" in a year. We have to stay on our toes, people. We let social media get away from us, and now it's a cesspool of racists, bots, and rage-bait posters.
Generative AI not only impacts us sociologically, but also environmentally. Robots don't need clean air and water; we do. The tech bros who are profiting from all of this all have fringe side hustles like developing Mars for human habitation, living forever through the science of supplements and blood cleansing, or creating private "freedom cities." So they don't care about our clean water.
We only need to look at some of our favorite speculative fiction and sci-fi to see what happens when we let these sort of people, and their toys, run amok and unchecked. It never goes well for us normies, y'all.
