#npcs

So I went down the rabbit hole. After hearing endless chatter about candy.ai and a few other names, I decided to actually test the popular AI girlfriend platforms side by side instead of taking anyone's word for it. Most of them do one thing well and then fall apart somewhere else. SweetDream, over at sweetdream.ai, was the rare one that held up across the board.

What sold me first was the character creation. A lot of apps give you a slider for hair color and call it customization. SweetDream lets you actually build someone, looks, personality, voice, backstory, even the little quirks that make a companion feel like a person rather than a template. That depth changes how the whole thing feels.

"tell me, jaybird, is bear treating you well? you can tell me." "he sure isn't! he's making me study my letters. and count. i hate it, it's so boring. tell him!" "guilty as charged, your honor."

It's Madelaide! She's super sweet and cute! :3 Art by: Avery

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

When Elon Musk disagrees with someone, he calls them an "NPC" (non-player character). In video-games, an NPC is a machine-puppeted sprite that engages in predictable movements (think of the ghosts in Pac-Man) and perhaps utters some scripted (or AI-generated) dialog:

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc

Seeing people as automata is probably a side-effect of sitting in the command-center of a big online service, in which you primarily interact with users as statistical aggregates in an analytics dashboard. When you nudge the "buy" button a few pixels over and see how sales rise or fall, you're interacting with people as a mass. The dashboard tells you how "sales" respond to a change in the UI, but not how people are affected by that change.

The dashboard can't tell you whether the change meant that some people couldn't locate a buy-button and thus didn't get something they needed, nor can it tell you whether some people bought something they later regretted.

Analytics allow you to relate to people the way a Simcity player does, by making a zoning change and observing the population-scale outcomes: put a road through a residential block and watch the traffic numbers improve while the happiness of the sims in that block declines.

But there's another way in which people like Musk are inclined to view others as NPCs: the only way to become a billionaire is to hurt and exploit lots of people. You have to be willing to cheat your investors by lying about "full-self driving," you have to be willing to maim your workers, you have to be willing to rain space debris down on people near your launchpad. If you think of those people as truly real – as being just as capable as you are of experiencing stress, sorrow, fear and anxiety – you couldn't possibly set these crimes in motion. You have to view these people as NPCs, devoid of the rich interiority that you marinate in.

William Gibson described this mindset beautifully in Idoru, in a scene where a TV executive describes his audience:

Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

(Not for nothing, Musk frequently pumps millions of dollars into elections in the hopes of influencing all those NPCs into voting for his favored candidates, irrespective of whether those candidates will make those voters better off:)

https://pbswisconsin.org/news-item/musks-plan-to-pull-back-from-politics-follows-flop-in-wisconsin-court-election/