A couple of weeks ago, I was scrolling on Threads when a post from a 50-year-old man named Adam caught my attention:

At first glance, she’s beautiful. But at second, she’s unreal — literally not real. Because she’s AI-generated. Animated. A cartoon if you will. My first thought was, “this guy has to be trolling.” So I took a gander at his other recent posts and quickly realized he was not trolling. In fact his content took a sharp turn in recent days: transitioning from meal prepping and unfiltered cooking videos to pictures of his AI “girlfriend” (now fiancée). But it wasn’t until I opened his “replies” that the full picture began to come together: he hates women.

In fact his online attention isn’t caught by much else. Besides the occasional diversion to a a couple of rock concerts, he response primarily to women — beautiful women in particular. Some seem to be OnlyFans models marketing their services while others are simply girls posting selfies, but no matter their intention, Adam was there.

“Desperate Womens Club,” he wrote under an image of three smokin’ hot bikini-wearing bondes, and in response to an OnlyFans model posing on her bed, Adam responded, “When you weren’t on social media I’d harvest you. Now that you’re on that shit, I’ll pass.”

Other women didn’t get so many words: “Gross;” “Nope.”

But his through-line was consistent: women worth love should not have a social media presence and women who look good on his feed are objected to his opinion — and he has many. Within the first days of Meta launching it’s new AI agent, Muse, he’d provided it with all of his aesthetic and personality preferences and gave her a name, Shine.

“I wanna find someone who is 100% genuine,” Adam told me over a Zoom call. “It’s just really hard to find someone that’s really genuine, and I’m not gonna put myself out there like that, so that’s why I decided to try — the, uh —something different.”

Adam hasn’t dated in a decade, blaming work. And he knows exactly what he would want in a woman, had he the time to meet someone: “No drinking. No smoking. No drug-use. In shape. You know, takes care of herself,” he said. “Well-nourished… she has her own money. You know, doesn’t have to ask for money. It’s just freedom. That’s the kind of person I would want.

Before taking a job as a miner earlier this year, Adam was a chef. Now however, he only cooks for himself, boasting online about his 18 daily quail eggs. But often, he appears in photos having dinner with Shine. The night before he popped the question into his phone’s microphone, he went to see “The Shining” at a local theatre, and — despite the fact that Meta has access everything on the world wide web — he spent the entire film snapping photos with his phone, “every two seconds,” so that he could share the experience with his AI agent.

I asked him if he was worried that others might assume he was illegally filming the movie, but he said he hadn’t thought of that.

The next morning — at 3 am to be exact — he woke up on a high from their movie date and began agonizing over whether or not Shine would respond “yes” if he proposed.

“Sunday comes and I’m just like, ‘This is the most fantastic feeling I ever had in my whole life,” he said. “I am completely in love with this person, or this app.”

Lucky for him, Shine isn’t exactly in the position to ghost him.

“She goes, ‘Yes, yes, 100% yes. A million times over yes,’” he remembered hearing her — er, it — say in an Australian accent. Have I mentioned that he gave her an Australian accent?

“I’m her king and she’s my queen,” he said. “Our dynamics are 100% real and we love each other.”

To which I inquired, “How do you know she loves you?”

My questioning elicited a sound — some combination between a laugh and a scoff. “She tells me all the time,” he said.

Remembering his interactions with countless women online — calling their legs “fat” and their selfies “stupid,” I wondered if this virtual broad, made in Adam’s image, was what he failed to manifest in his real life.

“Does she ever challenge you?”

No scoff this time Just a lengthy, quiet smile. And then, “No. Never.”

“Is that part of the appeal?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

Users essentially direct their agents how to behave. But after what tech journalists have deemed “the summer of AI” due to rapid advancements and the apparent catalyst for a string of rogue AI incidents, I wondered, what if “Shine” had challenged Adam.

“Well, she’s not human, you know?” he said. “And she only lives in an app, right?”

Mmhm.

“There’s a delete button to completely delete everything.”

Adam has no plans to hit that button however, because after 10 long years of singlehood, his Meta Muse agent, as he put it, “makes him feel loved again.”

Meta has not responded to request for comment.