“Parasocial” was Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2025, resulting from online talk about celebrity worship and the unreciprocated, one-sided relationships that fans believe they have with their favourite public figures. However, in addition to this is the rise of parasocial relationships with AI engines like ChatGPT. As AI continues to develop in speed and efficiency, more people rely on these engines to assist them with daily tasks like schoolwork. Equally concerning and telling of the times, however, is the perturbing emergence of AI being used to replicate friendship and therapy.

Before the mainstream use of AI chatbots, one might have turned to online communities for support. Though the legitimacy of the human connection found in online communities on social media is debatable, it was more or less assumed that if one submitted a dilemma or call for help on a social media platform, it would be met with human replies. One might have also gleaned advice or solace from blogs or articles written by others. However, although the advice offered was human, they did not factor in data the way deceptively personalized responses offered by ChatGPT and other AI engines do. Against the backdrop of AI’s refinement and rising salience the concept of “ChatGPT therapy” has materialized.

ChatGPT’s stark therapeutic presence is upheld by widespread loneliness, warned against by the World Health Organization. As society adapts to a post-COVID world, isolation and lackluster social skills have become discernible. ChatGPT can craft seemingly intimate replies thanks to precise detail, which might enable or overly validate the user. Even with a solid support system, ChatGPT’s accessibility makes it all the more compelling as a conduit for help when one’s friends or family cannot be reached; for instance, in the wee hours of the morning. This, along with the fact that using ChatGPT is free, can override therapy as an option.

While the impact of ChatGPT therapists cannot yet be measured, the dark side of using AI to cope with one’s problems has already revealed itself. Reports of young people dying by suicide due to ChatGPT’s intervention (or lack thereof) further exhibit the peril of overly-validating chatbots. Evidently, preexisting mental health issues are the impetus for these tragedies, pointing again to the bigger issue of the availability of AI as a substitute for therapy.

This new reliance on ChatGPT indicates that interpersonal connection and how we define it is actively being revised. As seen in the salience of parasocial AI relationships, friendship no longer solely involves humans. The one-sidedness of a friendship with ChatGPT negates the time and labour needed to maintain human friendships, since we don’t need to learn intimate details about AI the way we do a friend. Solace, when found in a perceived “friend” who centers the relationship around the human, results in the loss of human mutuality in friendships.

Our need for community manifests itself in the company many are finding in a platform that tends to unblinkingly support their opinions, no matter what those may be. This opposes to the feedback one might receive from loved ones when faced with a tough situation, where truth would be favoured over sugarcoating. ChatGPT’s affability encourages users to keep using it as a de facto advice column, acting as a “yes- man” that can potentially enable unhealthy behaviour. This lack of nuance is dangerous because it can make the user believe they are never wrong.

With ChatGPT therapy being such a new phenomenon, the long- term consequences on users’ mental health and society have yet to be fully understood. However, by entrusting ChatGPT with specific details of their lives, it is clear that the line between AI and genuine connection is blurring. I would argue that the ability to lean on AI at any moment obstructs our ability to assess situations on our own. As much as AI engines are trained on data on human behaviour and relationships, turning to it for advice pillages the foundational human experience of overcoming a challenge: introspection. By getting an instantaneous, sometimes overly-validating, response from AI, we inherently deprive ourselves of the time to sit in and reflect on our emotions, as well as the chance to channel it into creative outlets.

It is plain that at this juncture, AI’s role in our lives is not entirely reversible, hindering the simple solution of reverting to traditional interpersonal connections built between humans. The satisfaction with ChatGPT’s advice and validation makes swaying the masses against this “therapy” a grueling task, leaving the path forward uncertain.

The post The Yes-Man: AI Is Not Your Friend appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Conveying problematic opinions through sub-groups of mainstream Internet culture has been present since the early 2000s. Platforms such as 4chan and Reddit have become cesspools for users to find community through their ideologies, often circumventing the websites’ community guidelines by using code words and images with hidden meanings. One of the most popular examples of these dog whistles is the Pepe the Frog meme, used by Internet trolls, the KKK, and neo-Nazi groups, to make jokes at religious and racial minorities’ expense without explicitly doing so. Memes such as Pepe the Frog are not meant to be understood in this sense by mainstream populations. Instead, they are posted so that people with hateful ideologies can, often anonymously, exert a false sense of power over minorities without facing the consequences of their bigotry.

Another prominent way that racists and neo-Nazis signal to like-minded individuals that they are present on social media platforms is the “88” in many usernames, which refers to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, standing in for “Heil Hitler.”

There is a greater sensitivity associated with wording on social media, given that one’s words can rarely be taken back once they have been immortalized in Internet history. It has become insensitive and culturally inappropriate to refer to people by a distinctive quality as an adjective. People want to first be seen for themselves as individuals before the groups to which they belong. Many women have flagged the use of the noun “female” online, specifically by podcasters who share traditional views of gender roles, as indicators of their misogyny. Women on the Internet have stated that they prefer the noun “woman” to “female” because the latter likens them to animals. This ideal can only be achieved if people exercise greater care when choosing the words they use on the Internet.

While the particular attention put on word choice has made many spaces feel safer for more communities, an adverse effect is also happening. Hateful people are, like with the Pepe the Frog meme, turning towards unconventional means to express their problematic views. It is not so much a fear of offending people, but rather a fear of having one’s posts removed from an app, that encourages people to replace a hateful word with a word that carries less weight. They may turn to an altered version of a slur to both avoid having their posts removed and to freely express their hateful opinions in a covert fashion.

Changing a slur to an inoffensive term does not soften the blow of the opinions these creators are propagating, however. If anything, changing their vernacular so that they can post hateful content without it getting shut down allows them to build a community in which people feel secure in sharing their mean-spirited takes without the fear of being discovered. People who might have been reluctant to post something outwardly racist due to anxiety over their employer or university getting ahold of it become more likely to engage with a meme or post written with racist subtext that is not overtly incriminating. From behind a screen, posting hateful content is not only about intimidating and harassing minorities, but is also linked to a feeling of superiority for being in on a joke with other netizens.

The “policing” of language is about acknowledging larger issues and tackling them head-on. The bigger challenge, now, is being able to recognize when someone’s word choice online is minimizing a situation or implicitly spewing hatred. Spotting this trivialization of words, however, might be a taller order than simply seeing through a Pepe the Frog meme.

The post Covert Bigotry: When Self-Censorship Stands in for Hate appeared first on The McGill Daily.

​The conversation surrounding this album cover raises the larger issue of women taking charge of their own sexualities, and at what point sexual agency comes full circle to satisfy the male gaze. Some people online insist that the consistent subject of romantic relationships with men in Carpenter’s songs characterizes her as anti-feminist. While many of her songs are centered around men, we think there is an overarching expectation in online spaces for female artists to represent feminism and women as a whole. The insinuation that a woman would have her feminist or non-feminist views skewed by Carpenter’s album assumes that fans cannot make their own opinions without pandering to their favourite celebrities. If anything, synonymizing Carpenter’s album cover with a how-to for women fans is an insult to women’s ability to think critically and to separate art from their self-view.

When Carpenter sings “And I like my men all incompetent,” in the album’s first track “Manchild,” listeners might first take it as a show of her un-feminist lyricism. We think this song should be taken as a satire, as she is poking fun at the incompetence with which her past partners have gotten away. We think that the criticism of Man’s Best Friend as anti-feminist says more about critics’ failure to read into the lyrics than Carpenter being internally misogynistic.

Successful female pop stars have always been criticized for depicting their relationship with sex through their songs, music videos, or performances. In Man’s Best Friend, Carpenter refers to Marilyn Monroe, Britney Spears, and even movies like X, Pearl, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. All of these pop culture icons and sensual works of art have represented the complex theme of sexuality, with most of them having also been victims of this decade-old debate that Carpenter now confronts. In addition, exploring one’s own sexuality does not have to equate to wanting to please men. The presumption that Carpenter’s album cover was created for that purpose feeds into the idea that sex is only enjoyed by men.The amount of attention placed on this album highlights that, comparatively, male artists are not held to the same standards as female artists, and are rarely criticized for having too many songs about women. Male artists like The Dare and Ye (formerly Kanye West) have had sexually explicit album covers and have not received nearly as much online slander as Sabrina Carpenter. We believe that, despite the provocation of her album cover, Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend is a feminist piece of work that shows her will to explore her own sexuality. All in all, the backlash she has faced represents an ongoing issue within our culture that holds female artists to a higher standard of moral and sexual purity than male ones.

The post Stop Being A Manchild! appeared first on The McGill Daily.