Nearly all of it is AL videos. Today she showed me a “cure” for a painful knee ( I think). It involves making a salve of olive oil, coriander seed and a bay leaf among other things. She is determined to try it despite everything I point out.
The hell it’s harmless! There is a lot of shit being posted that stops people from getting timely help, and some of that is directly harmful.
Have you been thinking that second letter is an “L”?
The OP states that she believes most, if not all of it, so there is a very good chance she could come to harm.
Then marinate for three hours, and roast at 350 degrees until it reaches an internal temperature of 165. It sounds pretty tasty.
Most people just aren’t wired that way. She might believe that she did something wrong, or that one video had a glitch in it, or that Big Whatthafuck put that video out to besmirch all the other videos out there etc.
Most of the AI crap she watches is animal videos, She was watching one video with a bear interacting with a child on the porch. I pointed out to her the door mat that kept disappearing and reappearing. She got mad at me. Another one had a parrot wrapped in a mesh sleeve (Chinese finger trap) while three fledglings stood beside her with their beaks open and crying. The bird was in the rain beside a busy highway. She was cursing all the heartless people that didn’t stop to help. I give up…
It isn’t harmless and when it doesn’t work they will learn from it?
Tell that to the folks that see, as I have, and believe the AI videos that promise a cure for diabetes and other chronic conditions that will kill people if those diseases are not actually treated.
Every day Butler’s jihad against the Thinking Machines (and their masters) makes more and more sense.
I have the deepest sympathy for you. It sounds like what a lot of posters with MAGA or MAGA adjacent feelings are going through. They are stuck now living in an alternate reality where being shown the truth is an attack on their feelings. And they put this new found belief/faith before their faith and trust in you. That’s agonizing.
I characterize it as a faith because just as I said, it’s beyond factuality, it cannot be disproved via observation, logic, and they are so emotionally invested in it that they can and will abandon those closest to them to stay true to the faith.
If you’re at the give up stage… I don’t have anything constructive I can add. I know the MAGA spouses have discussed divorce, and the unspeakable difficulty of such due to age, health, interconnected finances and all. I know that my grandfather, who was abused and controlled by his certifiably crazy wife (his second wife, not my grandmother) was so fatalistic about it he was just willing to wait until one of them died (which broke my mother and uncles hearts for MANY reasons including his refusal to come to my wedding because his wife demanded otherwise.
But if she doesn’t wake up soon, fraudulent health and over empathy with fakes is possibly the least bad option. So many followed various originally innocent paths down “related” links and ended up in very dark places.
If you think she would listen to someone else (sometimes they won’t hear it from you, but may take it from someone else close to them) it might be worthwhile… but again, if you’re truly at the point of giving up and can manage it… I’d consider going your own way before one more “Innocent” video to support those who save roadside birds ends up with your credit card or account information.
Get a subscription to Grok Imagine or some other service and start making animal videos yourself. Tell her you found them on the internet. Keep on producing more and more videos, making them more ridiculous as you go along. At some point she’ll stop believing them, at which point you’ll tell her they were all fake, and laugh in her face.
She’ll probably divorce you, but at least she’ll have learned something.
She probably will divorce him and not learn anything!
Probably, but it’ll be funny!
Do videos making false promises about curing diseases using actors make you believe in a jihad against humans?
Just the humans making money from fraud.
Why wouldn’t she get mad at the video fakers…?
Why don’t they ever get mad at the people who have been lying to them…?
Some people do. Those are the ones who pull away from the cult in the early hours of their exposure.
But for the people who are wired to believe, it’s a one-way trip with no offramps.
Almost all forms of disordered or lazy thinking are self-reinforcing spirals. Wackiness breeds wackiness. And once it’s your brain mind that’s malfunctioning, the only tool that could pull you out, can’t.
Much of what we know about drug / alcohol addiction applies to woo / CT addiction too. The only “upside” is that although it may wreck your mind, your relationships, and your finances, it probably won’t actively harm your body anything like excess drugs / alcohol will.
Until, ref folks upthread, you try the Tide Pod Miracle Cure or start injecting bleach on the advice of some conman with a fake tan. Or ref Steve Jobs, decide to cure your actual cancer using fruit juice.
Some people hit some kind of bottom and are willing to surrender their self-reinforcing pride to a rehab process where other people re-program their thinking for them until they are cured. Most don’t, and death is the only way out of their trap.
Sucks to be them. Sucks also to be their spouse, parent, or child.
That was an absolute masterclass of a reply. Agree from end to end.
Because that means admitting they’ve been fooled, which is the worst thing imaginable.
My wife also believes in a lot of (mostly) harmless woo.
She doesn’t believe in the Mandela Effect. She believes some guy on Facebook Reels who says that there are alternate universes, and we switched from the one in which Fruit of the Loom undies had the wicker cornucopia into the one in which they never did. At some point in the 70s or 80s I guess.
She believes in astrology, although (thankfully) she doesn’t make any decisions based on it.
She believes those guys in Canada really are going to find buried pirate treasure on Oak Island some day. And absolutely the Rosicurians (or maybe it was the Knights Templar) had something to do with it.
…and so on.
ETA: Fortunately, she’s (mostly) grounded in reality. For example, she watched, with me, in awe as the Artemis craft slipped behind the moon a few weeks ago, without once shouting “Fake!” And of course, she’s as far from MAGA as possible.
I thought it was a mashup of AI and HAL (as in the 2001: A Space Odyssey computer). Even if not, I kinda like that: a nod to a famous AI prognostication, while gently mocking the (IMHO) overblown claims of sentience (it’s all just some dude named Al, like in the Paul Simon song).