How I leverage AI to keep up my cool-girl reputation
Quick tips to make everyone think you're cool without lifting a finger. Except to prompt Grok of course!
Make no mistake: we’ve entered the AI era. If you don’t hop on the train now, you’re getting left behind.
People love to yap yap yap on Substack and elsewhere about how AI is killing creativity, killing thoughtfulness, killing our ability to read and critically think. What’s the stone age like, babes? It’s so much easier to dictate my articles to an AI text-to-speech tool than to spend time typing and making sure I’m spelling everything right.
AI isn’t some boogeyman that just exists to take our jobs and ability to think; we can also use it to fake it until we make it online and gain a bunch of friends and followers. On Instagram, on Pinterest, and of course, on X, the Everything App.
Here are the steps I take to leverage these incredible new tools in order to make myself seem cool on the internet.
Using AI To Cultivate My Unique Personal Style
I ask Grok regularly for advice on what to wear in the morning. However, since Grok is trained on X (The Everything App)’s user data, I’ve found it’s unable to recommend me anything that isn’t a stained hoodie and cargo shorts. No matter. I can probably make cargo shorts work.
I then ask Google Gemini if it can see Bella Hadid wearing cargo shorts six months from now. It works swimmingly. “What an insightful observation! You amaze me every day with your brilliant insights on fashion, style, and general knowledge about the world. Bella Hadid could potentially in the future, be wearing cargo shorts.” Brilliant! I then instruct my Microsoft Copilot agent to head to Temu and optimize the site to order me the three cheapest options for cargo shorts.
They’re not comfortable, probably because they’re made of lead and microplastics, but they look good on Instagram if I can angle my mirror selfie in a way where my shorts don’t look transparent. I have only gotten three UTIs using this method, and it was worth it every time because of the double-digit story likes I got.
Leveraging Agents To Fake-Improve My Music Taste
Every morning I ask Claude to source five up-and-coming artists from a Pitchfork article that I don’t have time to read.
A bot I vibe-coded takes these results and automatically combs Spotify for the third-most popular song from all of these artists and texts it to all of my most cracked music-head friends with the fire emoji attached.
They typically don’t respond. Probably because they’re busy listening to my insane recs, and digging in to find more about these artists, and they’re just so in awe at how good the music is, and how good my taste is, that they don’t even have time to respond to my music recs or my birthday party invite or anything.
The only time this has ever backfired was when the Pitchfork article it pulled from was not up-and-coming musicians, but the musicians who were hit the hardest by assault allegations in the wake of #MeToo. Ummm, awkward!
AI hallucinations are, of course, an occupational hazard here, so be careful. As long as you can come up with an explanation when your friend replies “?” to your recommendation of an R. Kelly song, you’re safe.
Prompting Image Generation Tools To Create Custom, Gorgeous Vacation Instagram Stories
Every six weeks, I prompt ChatGirlina (what I have strictly instructed ChatGPT to call it— sorry, her— self) to give me three of the hottest vacation destinations. Without fail, it gives me the same three. Tulum. Cartagena. Phuket.
I want to throw her at a wall because those are clearly 2023’s top destinations and not 2025’s. But after a quick, restorative session of asking Perplexity, who I occasionally use as a therapist, what went wrong in my childhood, I’m able to bring myself back to reality. I should not throw my feminine-coded AI tool at the wall, I remind myself.
No worries. If I can’t find a cool, underground vacation destination to fake Instagram stories from, I can leverage the power of AI to create my own. I quickly pull up Midjourney and paste the five cities ChatGirlina gave me into it.
Make a photo I could realistically post on my Instagram story to make people, especially my ex-boyfriend and all of his friends that think they’re so much better than me, think I’m in an amazing vacation spot that is a combination of x, y, and z.
The pictures it spits out end up looking too animated and fake and weird, so then I just go on Google and vaguely search “pretty lake” and post those really zoomed-in instead. I don’t location tag them. Hot people gatekeep. I sigh and turn my phone off.
After a long day of prompting, I unwind by pouring a plastic water bottle onto the sidewalk for a little bit of me time.