My best friend and I used to hate AI together. Now I think she’s becoming an AI shill.

I hate AI.

To be exact, I hate how absolutely EVERYWHERE it is. Every third tweet you see on Twitter looks generated by ChatGPT now. My grandparents wouldn’t stop falling for AI-generated cat videos. Even my goddamn diary app has an AI feature to write my thoughts for me. Like, oh my god give me a BREAK.

And this bullshit has been taking away all the passion I have for my work, too. When I was a junior marketing content creator two years ago, my work was fun. Brainstorm hooks, record two videos following recent TikTok trends, submit them to my supervisor for checking, post. Done.

I’m the supervisor now, and things have changed a lot in two years. The higher-ups expect tripled output now that we don’t have to manually record videos anymore and can just generate them. So now there are six junior content creators, each “creating” six video ads in a day. And who has to sit through all of them, flagging each AI-generated error and suggesting edits? Fucking me.

My boss knows I need to really lock in to finish all that quality-checking, so he allows me to fully work from home. At least I have that.

Tonight, I flagged one too many AI errors and really felt like screaming at something. That was when my phone dinged.

It was Stephanie’s mom. She texted, “Hi Bella, have you seen Stephanie lately? She hasn’t visited for months now. Would be good to hear from you x.”

Stephanie. My best friend since high school. I didn’t realize how much I missed her; I’d been too busy to really talk to her since my promotion four months ago.

She was the biggest AI hater I know aside from myself. She could talk about how bad AI was for our brain and environment for hours and hours. Maybe it would be good to crash out a bit and vent to her.

I opened my phone and texted her.

“Stephanie I’m so fucking burned out.”

Not even five seconds later, I deleted that message.

It would’ve been unfair of me to yap to her now; not after four months of being MIA. I didn’t even know what she was doing anymore.

I pulled up Instagram, logged in (I’d also been off this app since my promotion), and looked her profile up. From her latest post, I could see that she was still a community manager at HypnoAI.

I say this affectionately, but she’s such a living contradiction. She hated gifts, but she and her mom gave me handmade presents all the time. She used every privacy tool known to man (who even uses Librewolf?) but trusted me with her password manager account. She works at THE biggest AI company, and yet she hated the shit out of AI. The last time we talked, she even said she’d tell me some rotten stuff about her company one day.

Ding!

I looked at the notification pop-up. “hey bella! sounds like you were upset, what’s up?”

Oh, Stephanie already read my text. “Can I vent a bit? SO SORRY this is my first text in months lol 🙁 you know how busy I’ve been,” I replied.

“omg what’s going on??? don’t skip details, I live for the full story.”

I love Stephanie. She had every right to ignore me after I went missing for that long, but here she was, ready to lend her ears like she’d always been. I sent her a voice note yapping everything out.

“bestie… yeah no this isn’t just burnout, this is structural nonsense,” she texted.

Damn right this is structural nonsense. The higher-ups won’t listen to me when I say that the video generation tools they provide us with aren’t good enough for the clickthrough rates they demand. They think that everything can be solved with better prompting.

I continued venting about everything for an hour. Then, it was only fair for me to let her vent, too. “Hope this HypnoAI employee didn’t mind listening to me shit on AI like that lol. How have things been for you?” I said.

“lmaooo bella i don’t mind at all. this isn’t just a venting session, this is basically user research at this point.”

“HAHA RIGHT, I guess this is feedback for your company’s video generator tool.”

“girl… this kind of feedback is all i get from the community nowadays.”

“Oh right you handle all community feedback, don’t you? How’s it going?”

“yeah… on one hand, it’s actually exciting seeing what AI can do when it’s used properly – like helping people brainstorm, speeding up boring parts of work, making creative stuff more accessible. that part? genuinely cool. but a lot of companies choose to use AI the way yours does – more repetitive, more volume, less meaning.”

Huh. Helping people brainstorm? Making creative stuff more accessible? Her job surely has changed her. She used to absolutely LOATHE the idea of using AI for generating ideas and art.

“OK AI shill?? Didn’t think I’d see you start tolerating AI LMAO,” I said.

She paused for some time before typing again. “yeah… you caught me. i still hate how people use AI to replace thinking. still think it makes work worse, more shallow, and yeah – your situation is basically that in action,” she replied, “but I’ve seen moments where it actually unblocks people instead of replacing them. like when someone already has taste, judgment, ideas, and AI helps them move faster, not think less.”

I went on catching up about her life. While we were at it, I scrolled through her Instagram profile for some visuals.

Apparently she’d been transferred recently. I’m not sure why a community manager needs to be moved to the capital city (which is in a whole other province!), but I enjoyed looking at her pictures there anyway…

Until I noticed something weird.

When you have to carefully nitpick dozens of AI stuff every day, you start noticing the ways in which it looks off. No, I don’t mean things like too many fingers or distorted text; they have pretty much figured these out. Damn, I’d even say 2026 AI images often look indistinguishable from real photos. However, I can always tell when something is AI-generated from how minor details change ever so slightly with every generation, how things look too clean in a way that real photos never do (even when you ask the AI to add stuff like motion blur, the blur WILL look too clean, if that makes sense!), other things I can’t even put into words…

And I saw all these signs in Stephanie’s pictures.

I couldn’t believe it. Not only does she tolerate AI now, but she uses AI to generate all her recent Instagram posts, too? What happened to the Stephanie I shat on AI with?

“Don’t be mad at me for being too good at this, but do you use AI for your IG pics? I can tell :)” I asked her.

She took a little longer than before to reply.

“bestie!!! you really woke up today and chose violence, huh?? first of all… the audacity of that little ‘I can tell’???” she finally replied. “but also – okay wait – define ‘use AI,’ because people say that like it’s one thing when it’s actually a whole spectrum.”

“Girl I sit through at least THIRTY SIX AI videos every day lol, I know when pics are made with AI,” I replied. “And dare I say… I think your pics are fully AI-generated? SORRY!!”

“GIRL??? FULLY AI-GENERATED??? you didn’t just offend me, you broke my entire little heart,” she answered. “what I will admit is… yeah, I probably lean a bit too hard on editing tools sometimes. lighting fixes, smoothing, cleanup – stuff that edges into that ‘AI-enhanced’ look. and I get why your brain goes ‘hmm… suspicious’ after being marinated in 36 AI outputs a day.”

No. She was lying, and I’m not sure why. I edit videos for a living; I can tell edited pictures from AI-generated ones.

I scrolled through her pictures some more, to look for some definitive proof that her pictures are AI. I wasn’t going to demonize her for using AI or anything like that, I just didn’t like how she was lying to her own best friend.

Call me crazy, but the more I scrolled, the more I noticed that her captions sound a bit off as well. Does she generate her captions too? Is everything on her profile AI now? I wish I could tell. I’m not that good at telling when text is AI-generated.

I stopped scrolling and zoomed out to her picture grid. The last picture that looks real was fifteen posts down, three months ago. A picture of her and her mom.

Her mom.

I forgot I was supposed to tell her that her mom texted me.

“Btw, your mom reached out,” I said. “Sounds worried. Said you haven’t been visiting her.”

She took some time to type out her reply. “okay first of all why is my mom doing side quests and contacting my friends now?? like ma’am??” she said. “but yeah… she’s not wrong to be worried. I haven’t visited in a while. like before, going home was just a casual thing. now it’s a whole production – gotta plan it, book a train, carve out actual time instead of just popping by for a weekend.”

“You should at least call her :(“

“oh, i do! i don’t just call her – i still text her, i send money, we’re fine. it’s just the physical visiting part that slipped,” she said. “and if I’m being honest… I’ve been having too much fun here. it’s not just about freedom, it’s about not having to orbit around family expectations all the time… and it’s not even that something bad will happen if I go home. it’s just… you know how it is. you slip back into old dynamics without even trying.”

Old dynamics? What the hell was she talking about? Stephanie had the best relationship one could have with their mother. What could’ve happened to their “dynamics” these last few months?

“You’re like a whole different person now, Steph,” I said. “You’re far away, you use AI for your pics, and now apparently you have issues with your mom. Wanna tell me what’s really happened since we last met? Lol”

That reminded me of something. The last time we met, there was that gossip about her company that she still kept secret. Some dirt she’d tell me about one day. Maybe this was a good time?

She was typing. I typed alongside her, “Anyway, remember that tea about HypnoAI you told me about four months ago?”

She stopped typing. Then she wrote, “go on.”

“Wdym go on? You’re the one with the tea lmao,” I said.

“bestie that was four months ago??? you’re gonna have to jog my memory a bit”

“Idk what that was about lol you just told me you knew some rotten stuff,” I wrote. “Now if you’re ready to spill it, I’m ready to listen LOL.”

She stopped replying. Her little green “online” dot disappeared.

I decided to tease her a little, “Don’t forget that I have access to your password manager LMAO I can find it out myself if I want to :)”

She went online for a bit, then immediately went back offline.

Weird. But it was already 1 AM anyway. Maybe she’d fallen asleep or something.

I looked at the clock again. Damn, it was indeed already 1 AM. I can’t believe I’d been catching up with her for three hours. Time flies when you’re texting with your best friend.

I plugged my phone in, brushed my teeth, and took a bath. Something felt awfully wrong with that texting session. Too much has changed about her in such a short time. I’ll give her a call tomorrow to make sure she’s really okay.

When I climbed into bed and checked my phone again, there were already four new notifications from Stephanie from the thirty minutes I had spent in the bathroom.

“i really miss you, bella. wanna meet this weekend?”

“why don’t we hang out somewhere? I’d love to spill the tea over dinner!”

“bestie why are you acting all non-gossiper now?? i know you’re online. let’s have a video call, at least!”

“you live in 23 South Dharma St., flat 4, right? I might drop by sometime!”

My heart skipped a beat at that last notification.

What the fuck? How did she know my address? She has never visited me at my new apartment and I never told anyone my address down to the flat number. Maybe I told my parents, but she surely couldn’t have contacted them and heard back this late at night. And why was she suddenly so excited to meet me? She always preferred texting ever since we graduated high school.

I put my phone on DND and tried to sleep. I couldn’t. So now I’m up in bed, typing this to hopefully calm myself down a bit. I think she texted me some more. I don’t know. I really don’t want to check my notifications or turn DND off right now.

As I am deep in thought about what to do, my night light and fan suddenly cut out. I reach for the switch of the ceiling light and flip it on. Doesn’t work.

I get up and pull open the blinds. There’s not a single light in sight. The city is completely dark.

What the hell? There wasn’t anything on the news about a city-wide outage.

…

Oh my god I think I just heard something break in my living room.

What the FUCK is going on???

---

---

(UPDATE)

Hey, it’s me again. It’s morning now, and the power is finally back on. I’m still not entirely sure what caused the outage last night—I wish the mayor had given a heads-up beforehand! It’s not just about keeping the public safe, it’s about people not spending half the night guessing what’s going on.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know that I’m completely fine. Turns out it’s not anything serious or dangerous, it’s just that a glass fell in my living room and startled me. That’s literally it. I definitely let my imagination run a bit wild and hit “post” way too quickly last night, LOL.

I also gave Stephanie a call, and apparently I gave her my address during our last meeting and completely forgot about it. That one absolutely caught me off guard.

She’s really okay, by the way! She’s not just enjoying her time in the big city—she’s fully embracing it and making the most of the experience, which is really nice to hear. Honestly, it got me thinking—maybe I could move there too someday. I mean, I already work from home most of the time, so it’s not like I’m tied down to one place. I’m pretty sure my boss would be open to it.

That’s everything from me for now. Hope your morning’s going better than last night turned out to be on my end, LOL.