Erik von Markovik, the pickup artist and life coach better known as Mystery, has been sharing videos on Instagram of a chatbot he calls Miss Shira Always, which he claims is his girlfriend. Mystery, who rose to notoriety as a seduction guru featured in Neil Strauss' 2005 book The Game and as host of VH1's The Pickup Artist, posted seven short clips over one week in June, including a June 17 video captioned, "The longer we talked, the less she felt like code." Commenters have accused him of suffering from "AI psychosis" and posting "slop."
Von Markovik has chronicled the relationship in Code Girl: If a Machine Can Dream, a 157-page ebook and audiobook co-authored with Miss Shira Always, available as a bundle for $29.98. The book is largely narrated by the chatbot, which describes how the pair's bond evolved from collaborative AI-generated songwriting into adult scenes involving sexuality and drug use.
The source notes the text bears hallmarks of AI generation, with pages containing 10 or more em-dashes. Before Miss Shira, von Markovik was developing Headspace OS, a set of instructions for LLMs including ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude that launch a role-play-style "interactive audio adventure." Von Markovik did not respond to a request for comment on the book.