Wordblitz, Rubbish, and Why This Might Be My Most Creative Year Yet.

For one thing, I can’t beat Jay. Jay is a very funny pal I know from the pub, and he is an absolute machine when it comes to this word search quiz game. It’s a game that recognises various naughty words, but not words like “Saxon”. Nonetheless, I can find loads and loads of words, but I can’t beat Jay. I was about to the other day and the game disappeared. I’ll assume I lost. It’s frustrating, but that’s not why I have to stop the game. I must stop the game. After all, it is only free to play because it makes you watch a bunch of ads, and those ads are getting increasingly awful. There are ads for other games like Royal Match where you can see gameplay of a king having to escape some deadly gunge, which I’m told by people who play the game only occurs every four hundred levels. The rest is a boring shape-matching game. Then there were ads for games like Dice Dreams advertised by Kate Beckinsale. Fair enough! Then the ads for Project Makeover started happening and oh gawd…

If you have never heard of Project Makeover, it is yet another variation on the matching game, but it is advertised by a portion of the gameplay where a woman gets a free makeover. Well, that’s quite nice, isn’t it? No, it’s the worst thing you can imagine! First, you get her backstory. She’s either in a scummy bed feeling sick, when her boyfriend snaps and attacks her, pushing her off the bed while he slices the bed in two with a chainsaw, and she is left cowering in fear, or she has rotten teeth and when she goes to kiss him, he slaps her, or there is a crying baby in the room and the fella threatens to hurt the child, so she takes it and heads out in the snow in her pyjamas and slippers. She finds refuge in a salon, where to “help her” you can play a matching game to get a free makeover for her, or, as the ad often plays out, further attack and humiliate her.

And you are thinking, my goodness, that’s awful, I would stop playing there and then. I wish I had your resolve! I kept playing until I got the fake results ads for real women, where AI art is used to demonstrate how in just 28 days, an overweight woman can be transformed into a thin woman by following a “28-day indoor walking challenge”. Yeah, don’t fall for that.

My final straw, or straws: I have no idea what it was even though I saw it several times. I’m sure you’ve seen by now those ‘amazing transformation’ filters on TikTok or Reels where thin girls pretend to have big, fat, saggy bellies, with excess skin, and then – snap! – it all disappears and they’re slim and lovely. Usually, these ads are used to sell some horrible midriff-hugging PE knickers. Well, imagine this combined with degrading film imagery of girls by themselves or with a fella, with split-second views of him about to use his mouth or fingers on her, likely taken from those specialist channels, implying that their foo foo is gross, but after wearing a corset thing around their middles, they are now fragrant and pokable. These ads are interchanged with ones for Happy Hospital – which looks like an animated form of Operation, except you aren’t extracting a funny bone with a pair of tweezers, but maybe a big sack of pus from an infected piercing. Yuk!

I just feel like I have been a guinea pig, with the system testing how far I am prepared to tolerate fakery, false claims, and images of violence, abuse, or general grossness in return for dopamine hits of virtual trophies for beating “Fiona” at finding a few words in a grid – and Fiona could well be a bot, for all I know.

I think the worst thing of all is that Wordblitz, which allows these ads, is accessed via Facebook, so it is legitimized by Meta. The minimum age for being able to access Facebook is 14, so there’s every chance that these games, and therefore these ads, are seen by children. I have started seeing these ads appear on the main feed of Facebook too, and there seems to be no effort made by Meta to remove them. There have been many complaints recently on my timeline about the proliferation of ads generally, instead of seeing posts from friends. This is because the timeline works on the same principle as one-armed bandits: infinite scrolling no longer works, it breaks, so you develop a behaviour instead to pull down the screen slightly, then release to refresh it, bringing new content to the top. Sometimes that will be a new post from a friend, sometimes it won’t. You don’t get the same reward every time. It’s all gauged to keep you on the site for longer. More on the addictive nature of social media here.

I think Meta is already aware of the issues, and I don’t think they care. They don’t stop publishers from replacing content on posts that have already garnered hundreds of reactions, resulting in it looking like a bunch of people are laughing at a tragic story or posting weird comments out of context. They don’t stop people from claiming things are real for likes that are just terrible AI pictures. And of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the awful things you can find on that site. 

It’s very difficult because much of my networking and social interactions pivot via social media, but I have already left Twitter, and it feels like a critical mass of exodus has already passed there. (The BBC don’t even call it X any more, without clarifying it as “Twitter/X”. Not even “X, formerly known as Twitter.”) When will it happen for social media generally? 

Do sign up for my newsletter, in case the social media apocalypse happens sooner rather than later…

Anyway, a fair compromise for me right now is to stay on Facebook, but avoid playing those darned addictive games. And read more of this huge pile of books. As for Project Makeover… well I just spent a load at the hairdresser, so that will do for now.

Anyway, the world is awful so here’s a poem I wrote, inspired by a story I saw recently about a model who has made her own “AI twin”, which I think you might agree has its pros as well as its cons, for such models and us mere human onlookers alike. It’s not the only story I have seen like this, there have been several such in recent months, plus I’ve seen people create versions of themselves for OnlyFans too. I should also stress this poem is not about a particular individual, and describes several harmful practices that I know have happened in that world for different people (and dare I say, different times, i.e. 90s) and only used in the context that the AI model can avoid them, which is a definite pro. The only thing borrowed from the recent story is the term “AI twin”, but the rest is generic. Very, very generic.

AI Model

I am an AI model, but I’ve got a real-world twin.
She’s just like me in every way, except a different chin.
And I don’t have her wrinkles, and she’s not quite as thin.
I save us both a bomb on makeup and not going to the gym.

I am an AI model, but though the real-world me’s a beaut.
She’s forgotten that in AI land, well, anyone can be cute.
Plus, if she thinks I’m her and her alone, she can’t be that astute.
My face is scraping others’ art; she’s heading for a suit.

I am just an AI model; I don’t really have a brain,
So if you are upset by me, I won’t hear you complain.
My twin is making money. Stuff your “real bodies” campaign.
Unrealistic expectations will be normalized again.

I am an AI model; I can’t do live catwalk shows.
But then I won’t go to your party and shoot drugs between my toes.
You can’t gift me your blood diamonds; I won’t destroy my nose.
I don’t even need ghostwriters for my turgid AI prose.

I am an AI model, and at modelling, I’m the best!
It’s a true designer body in this designer dress.
No puking, bumps, or snorts have played a part in my success
I can do it, hands behind my back – cos they’re a fucking mess.