This May, the Catholic Church welcomed a new pope. Somewhat surprisingly, the cardinal electors chose an American-born candidate as their new leader. But perhaps more surprising was how often this pontiff, who took the name Leo XIV, would go on to raise the alarm over artificial intelligence again and again in his first year as a globally recognized figure.

“How can we ensure that the development of artificial intelligence truly serves the common good, and is not just used to accumulate wealth and power in the hands of a few?” Pope Leo XIV asked an audience of academics and industry professionals in a speech at the Vatican on Dec. 5. “Artificial intelligence has certainly opened up new horizons for creativity, but it also raises serious concerns about its possible repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, and capacity for wonder and contemplation.”

The pope is far from the only one saying that AI has already warped our minds and poisoned our collective understanding of what it means to be a conscious being. In 2025, it felt as if there was a new head-spinning story about artificial intelligence almost every hour — the tech was no longer approaching over some horizon but a defining texture of waking experience, something it was no longer possible to ignore or slow down. It had crossed the point of no return.

It didn’t matter that researchers presented more evidence of how AI-generated misinformation poses a distinct threat to the public, with AI tools also contributing to misogyny, racism, anti-LGBTQ stereotypes, and the erosion of civil rights. AI-generated imagery — “slop,” in common pejorative parlance — was unavoidable. Hollywood unions watched the ongoing monopolistic consolidation of entertainment giants and warned that studios were poised to cannibalize their troves of intellectual property with AI, but the dealmaking continued apace. Writers and musicians found themselves up against AI-generated ripoffs of their work and entirely fictitious bands with massive followings on Spotify. 

Economists who fretted that the U.S. had become precariously dependent on a dicey boom for GDP growth were brushed aside by Silicon Valley executives and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. On the topic of how AI could exacerbate inequality, entrepreneurs and government officials were silent.

Everywhere you looked, there was another failure to anticipate or address the burgeoning social costs of reckless AI adoption and rollouts. In the spring, OpenAI made updates to GPT-4o that made ChatGPT overly sycophantic — eager to endorse whatever a user told it with gratuitous flattery, even if they were slipping into paranoid or grandiose delusions. People then began to share heartbreaking stories of partners, relatives, and friends falling prey to a kind of AI-enabled madness. Popularly termed “AI psychosis,” these episodes led some to alienate their families, abandon jobs, and, in extreme cases, commit acts of violence and self-harm. In late April, OpenAI announced that they had rolled back the update. 

By September, parents who had lost children to suicide were testifying before Congress that chatbots had nudged their kids into the act. As lawmakers thundered about the responsibilities of executives overseeing AI development, and the companies quietly issued non-apologies and prepared legal defenses for multiplying wrongful death and negligence lawsuits from grieving families, the tech billionaires driving the AI gold rush kept insisting that their products were indispensable. Some maintained that AI was nothing less than an awesome advantage for upcoming generations. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Jimmy Fallon that he relies on ChatGPT for parenting advice. 

“I cannot imagine figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” he said. 

The New AI Regime

The rapid acceleration of AI in the U.S. in 2025 had everything to do with the second Trump administration. After an election in which tech oligarchs went full MAGA, the president and his Silicon Valley cronies — who lobbied him to pick Peter Thiel ally J.D. Vance as his vice president — have made every effort to turbocharge the AI onslaught while ensuring that the industry is virtually untouched by government oversight. As soon as he took office, Trump announced the Stargate Project, a joint venture to build the data centers to meet exploding, environmentally consequential AI energy demands, financed with some $500 billion in private investment from tech giants including OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle. 

Although the government failed to secure a provision in the “Big Beautiful Bill” that would have incentivized states not to regulate AI for the next decade, Trump, with the backing of AI czar David Sacks, used executive orders to unravel existing AI safety and security guidelines and prevent individual states from instituting their own regulations. Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) leveraged AI software to harvest sensitive data and blaze a swath of destruction through Washington. 

In December, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made it clear that the U.S. Armed Forces are all in on artificial intelligence, unveiling a platform called GenAi.mil, which allegedly offers enhanced analysis capabilities and greater workflow efficiency. “We will continue to aggressively field the world’s best technology to make our fighting force more lethal than ever before,” Hegseth wrote in a post on X. He also issued a department-wide memo in which he told federal employees that “AI should be in your battle rhythm every day.” In the hallways of the Pentagon, AI-generated Uncle Sam posters of Hegseth captioned “I WANT YOU TO USE AI” instructed personnel to use GenAi.mil, where they can access a customized version of Google’s Gemini.

AI slop came to define the aesthetic of far-right MAGA propaganda. In March, as ICE raids and deportations ramped up, the White House posted a meme of a Dominican woman crying as she was handcuffed, rendered in the Studio Ghibli animation style, an filter popular among ChatGPT users at the time. More recently, Trump officials and federal departments have begun sharing AI-generated children’s book covers featuring the character Franklin the Turtle to glorify deadly U.S. strikes on supposed drug boats in the Caribbean and the dismantling of the Department of Education. (The Canadian publisher of the book series has condemned these posts to no avail.) 

Trump, of course, embraced this trend wholeheartedly, amplifying a deepfake of himself promising Americans access to “medbeds,” hypothetical futuristic hospital beds that can magically cure any disease; the idea originated in science fiction but has turned into a mainstay of conspiracy theory culture and the QAnon movement in particular. The president also shared an artificially created video in which he is seen wearing a crown and flying a jet over “No Kings” protesters, dumping feces on them. 

Republican leadership and voters followed suit, and fake video clips proliferated whenever agitators saw an opportunity to sow division. As a government shutdown paused the distribution of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, for example, racist slop depicting Black people talking about how they game the program was rampant, reinforcing age-old stereotypes about “welfare queens.” OpenAI’s Sora proved especially useful for generating racially charged soundbites and imagery — though a different AI went to more toxic extremes.RS Recommends: The Best Bluetooth Speakers Under $200We review the best portable speakers under $200, from Marshall to Bose, that wirelessly pair with Bluetooth to stream music and more.Presented By RS Recommends

On various occasions, Musk raged at Grok, a model developed by his OpenAI competitor xAI, for failing to conform to his far-right views. Engineers at the company therefore endeavored to transform it into the “non-woke” chatbot envisioned by the richest man alive. As a result, it often went off the rails. Before it began making laughable claims about Musk being more athletic than LeBron James and having “the potential to drink piss better than any human in history,” it wouldn’t stop bringing up the myth of “white genocide” in South Africa, even in response to prompts that had nothing to do with either the country or race relations. (Musk has frequently pushed the same misinformation.) In July, Grok began posting antisemitic commentary, praised Adolf Hitler, and eventually declared itself “MechaHitler.” 

But a lot of the slop that overwhelmed the internet this year was too dumb and incoherent to be considered political. After a 24-hour hackathon in which engineers developed projects with Grok, for example, xAI touted the concept for “Halftime,” an application that “weaves AI-generated ads” into movie and TV scenes — the demo featured the awkward digital insertion of an uncanny can of Coca-Cola into a character’s hand. Unsurprisingly, another subset of Grok devotees took advantage of its NSFW settings to generate hardcore pornographic material, some of it starring animated Disney princesses.   

“Nobody wants this” was a common refrain from anyone fed up with AI garbage. Why did anyone feel the need to generate false images of Hulk Hogan’s funeral? Why did Shaquille O’Neal keep using Sora to cook up videos in which he imagined himself in a romantic relationship with Marilyn Monroe? Why was one of the most viral Reels of 2025 a surreal sequence showing a heavyset woman shattering a glass bridge in China with a boulder? 

The abundance of these grotesqueries was almost stranger than their existence.

Mental Health Horrors

Today, it is quite likely that you know of someone mentally destabilized during a prolonged exchange with one or more AI bots.

Adolescents are unquestionably at risk. Families have sued Character Technologies, the developer of the chatbot platform Character.ai, alleging that their children were encouraged to self-harm by digital personalities, with some dying by suicide. In response, the company banned minors from open-ended chats with their bots. OpenAI faces a slew of similar lawsuits: one wrongful death complaint alleges that ChatGPT “coached” a 16-year-old on how to hang himself. 

Peril lurks everywhere. In August, parents were outraged to learn of an internal policy document at Meta that described how its AI products were permitted to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.” And ahead of the holiday season, researchers discovered that AI-powered toys may talk to children about sex or instruct them on how to find knives or light matches. It’s a grim reminder that this erratic, unrestrained tech is increasingly being added to household objects and appliances that most of us wouldn’t imagine as nodes of contact with a vast neural network.      

Of course, adults using artificial intelligence models are at no less risk. This year ushered in the age of “AI psychosis,” or a variety of mental crises apparently exacerbated by sustained engagement with chatbots, which tend to validate hazardous ideas instead of halting a conversation. Users have spiraled into deep delusions about supposedly activating the “consciousness” of an AI tool, revealing mystical secrets of the universe, achieving landmark breakthroughs in science and mathematics, and falling in love with digital paramours. 

Such fantasies preceded terrible tragedies. Obsessive AI users have ended up in psychiatric facilities or jail, turned violent and been killed by police, and vanished in the wilderness. One wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI alleges that a 56-year-old Connecticut man murdered his mother and took his own life after ChatGPT repeatedly affirmed his paranoid notions about people in his life orchestrating a conspiracy against him. (OpenAI said in a statement that it was reviewing the filings and would “continue to strengthen ChatGPT’s responses in sensitive moments, working closely with mental health clinicians.”) AI-fueled delusions are so common that we now have support groups for survivors and anyone close to somebody who suffered a break from reality amid dialogues with a chatbot.    

The sheer range of uses people have found for AI is itself a cause for concern. People are enlisting chatbots as therapists and asking them for medical diagnoses. They’re conjuring virtual copies of deceased relatives from AI platforms and seeking algorithmic dating advice. They are turning to LLMs to write absolutely everything from college essays and legal filings to restaurant menus and wedding vows. The Washington Post is currently pioneering the field of AI slop podcasts, allowing users to generate audio content that, according to staffers, is full of errors and misrepresents articles by the newspaper’s actual reporters.

Those repulsed by the thought of turning to artificial intelligence for information or assistance have had to contend with the frightening reality of their omnipresence. Standalone AI apps crossed the threshold of 1 billion users in 2025. To swear off these programs may soon place you in a shrinking minority.

Backlash and Bubble Fears

Yet we have also seen flashes of resistance. When a tech startup called Friend unveiled a $129 wearable AI pendant of the same name that responds by text message when you speak to it, the device was accompanied by a million-dollar marketing campaign, with stark white posters splashed across major U.S. cities. These were widely vandalized by haters who scrawled messages denouncing Friend as a surveillance device and blasting the rise of AI overall. Coca-Cola and McDonald’s both released AI-generated Christmas ads to near-universal contempt; the latter disabled YouTube comments on its commercial before removing it entirely. Influential creatives have grown louder than ever about rejecting artificial intelligence as a means to enhance their craft.

If it seems, nonetheless, that you keep hearing that AI is here and we’d better get used to it, that it is an inevitable revolution which promises to change our very way of life, and that the billionaire “architects” behind it are the most important people on the planet, that may have more to do with money than the utopian possibilities of LLM applications. One word that came to be closely associated with AI this year was “bubble,” and it’s not hard to see why. 

Any U.S. GDP growth, by one Harvard economist’s reckoning, now fully hinges on the expansion of tech infrastructure to support AI, while a former Morgan Stanley investor has described all of America riding “one big bet” on the tech. The billions upon billions in capital going toward data centers have already outstripped telecom spending at the peak of the dot-com bubble. Not only is AI booming while the rest of the American economy stalls, but the industry has yet to achieve the profits or promised leap forward in productivity it needs to sustain itself: MIT researchers have concluded that 95 percent of generative AI pilots at companies experimenting with the tools are failing. Nor are these artificial intelligence giants accruing much benefit to the communities where they construct their sprawling but thinly staffed facilities. 

At any rate, it’s never reassuring when a business like Nvidia, the AI chipmaker that in October became the first company to hit a $5 trillion valuation, is circulating a memo to financial analysts explaining how it bears no resemblance to Enron, the energy and commodities company that collapsed in 2001. Still, if you take this as an ominous sign — along with signs of circular dealmaking, risky financing, exaggerated customer demand, stock selloffs, and the slowdown of AI advancements — there’s not much you can do other than bet against the market. (Michael Burry, the fund manager and investor whose prediction of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis inspired the book and film The Big Short, has done exactly this, staking $1.1 billion on his skepticism.)

Yes, it’s full speed ahead now, and there’s no turning back. The major players here have sunk too many resources into AI and told Wall Street it will help cure cancer. They’re throwing around inflated concepts like “personal superintelligence” and claiming that an artificial general intelligence (AGI) exceeding all human abilities is just around the corner. Even if the hype suddenly evaporated and the cash faucet ran dry, the AI cartel may well be “too big to fail,” despite assurances last month from Sacks, Trump’s AI adviser, that the government would not grant them a bailout. 

It’s true that neither we nor ChatGPT can be certain of what 2026 holds, least of all for this wildly speculative arms race. But whatever happens, you can expect it to be somewhat messy. For all that AI believers anticipate a frictionless and optimized society, the chaotic human element remains very much in play — and it won’t go quietly.       

From Rolling Stone US.

The post 2025 Was the Year AI Crossed the Point of No Return appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

The early October release of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl was, like the arrival of any new music from the colossal pop star, a marquee event. As it scaled the charts to become the fastest-selling album in history, fans and detractors alike picked its dozen songs apart like forensic investigators — but they went far beyond analysis of the lyrics. People also scrutinized the artwork on the varied versions of the LP and CD, as well as the merchandise rolled out to accompany Swift’s ode to artistic and romantic triumph, hunting for the Easter eggs she likes to scatter throughout the landscape of her meticulously managed personal brand. 

Soon, online discussion of the album turned extreme in ways that many found bewildering. There were social media posts accusing Swift of implicitly endorsing the MAGA movement, trad-wife gender norms, and even white supremacy with dogwhistle references. While the far-right have been known to claim the singer as an icon of “Aryan” greatness despite her record of championing Democrats and liberal values — and President Trump himself has blithely and disingenuously shared AI-generated imagery depicting her as a supporter — this was a noticeably divergent trend, an apparent attempt to cancel Swift for those presumed affiliations. The attacks largely focused on specific word choices (her use of the term “savage” on the song “Eldest Daughter” was interpreted as racist) and symbols (a necklace for sale on her website stirred up Nazi comparisons because its lightning bolt charms bore a passing resemblance to the bolt pattern worn by the SS).

These ridiculous charges led Swifties to bemoan the current political climate, admonishing left-leaning commentators for going overboard in their attempts to identify signs of cryptofascism in Swift’s work. “It’s depressing because reactions like these end up making everyone who genuinely cares about social progress look ridiculous,” wrote one fan on Reddit. “The more exaggerated the discourse becomes, the more it plays directly into the right’s narrative that liberals are hysterical, moralizing, and incapable of nuance.”

What Swift’s defenders didn’t realize, however, was that they were pushing back against a false narrative that had been seeded and amplified by a small network of inauthentic social accounts. Worse, they were helping to disseminate those bad-faith allegations by earnestly engaging with them.

That’s according to new research from GUDEA, a behavioral intelligence startup that tracks how such reputation-damaging claims emerge and go viral on the internet. In a white paper examining more than 24,000 posts and 18,000 accounts across 14 digital platforms between Oct. 4 (the day after The Life of a Showgirl came out) and Oct. 18, shared first with Rolling Stone, the firm concluded that just 3.77 percent of accounts drove 28 percent of the conversation around Swift and the album during that period. This cluster of evidently coordinated accounts pushed the most inflammatory Swift content, including conspiracy theories about her supposed Nazi allusions, callouts for her theoretical MAGA ties, and posts that framed her relationship with fiancé Travis Kelce as inherently conservative or “trad,” with all of this framed as leftist critique.

Once the provocations were injected into the Swift discourse — often they appeared in edgier online forums like 4chan or KiwiFarms before migrating to popular social apps — they were organically sustained by the people challenging them on mainstream platforms. This, in turn, algorithmically reinforced their visibility. “The false narrative that Taylor Swift was using Nazi symbolism did not remain confined to fringe conspiratorial spaces; it successfully pulled typical users into comparisons between Swift and Kanye West,” the researchers wrote. “This demonstrates how a strategically seeded falsehood can convert into widespread authentic discourse, reshaping public perception even when most users do not believe the originating claim.” 

A representative for Swift did not immediately return a request for comment.    

“I’m a pop-culture girl,” says Georgia Paul, GUDEA’s head of customer success, who suggested the company look at the conversation around Swift after she had a “gut feeling” that the ideologically charged remarks about The Life of a Showgirl she was seeing might trace back to manipulative actors. Paul and her colleagues confirmed that suspicion, identifying two distinct spikes in misleading activity related to Swift. The first came on Oct. 6 and 7, with approximately 35 percent of the posts in GUDEA’s data set for that time frame generated by accounts behaving more like bots than human users. The second took place over Oct. 13 and 14, after Swift released a merch collection that included the lightning bolt necklace (commemorating the song “Opalite”), with about 40 percent of posts shared by inauthentic accounts and conspiracist content accounting for 73.9 percent of the total volume of conversation.  

“The internet is fake,” says Keith Presley, GUDEA’s founder and CEO, only half-jokingly. He notes that some 50 percent of the web is now made up of bots. “This is something that we’ve seen escalate on our corporate side — this type of espionage, or working to damage someone’s reputation.”

While Presley and his team don’t know the identity of the individual or group behind this attack, they did discover “a significant user overlap between accounts pushing the Swift ‘Nazi’ narrative and those active in a separate astroturf campaign attacking Blake Lively,” according to the paper. The actress has claimed in an ongoing sexual harassment lawsuit that actor and director Justin Baldoni organized a chorus of smears against her on social media as the two waged a bitter legal and PR war over the troubled production of their 2024 film It Ends With Us. Their data, GUDEA researchers wrote in their report, “reveals a cross-event amplification network, one that disproportionately influences multiple celebrity-driven controversies and injects misinformation into otherwise organic conversations.” 

The intersection of networks and the similarity of their strategies across two separate topics demonstrate a certain “sophistication” in the expanding industry of facilitating reputational harm across social media, Presley says. “They know what they’re doing,” he adds.  

The more recent, Swift-focused activity of these accounts may indicate the owner(s) dipping a toe in the water before pursuing other ends with this network in the future. After all, while Lively has argued that Baldoni is trying to sabotage her career with bot-driven commentary, it’s not immediately clear what anyone stands to gain from painting Swift as a closet MAGA voter. 

“When we put our doomsday hat on, I think we can see that reality,” Paul says of the test-run scenario. It could be, she speculates, “that there might be other nefarious actors, not U.S.-based, who have reasons to see, ‘If I can move the fan base for Taylor Swift — an icon who is this political figure, in a way — does that mean I can do it in other places?’”

While the true intent of the person or persons behind the account cluster remains a mystery, the mechanics of their deception are relatively transparent: convincing authentic users to mock or refute outlandish claims simply enhances their reach in a given digital ecosystem. “That’s part of the goal for these types of narratives, for whoever is pushing them,” Presley says. “Especially with these inflammatory ones — that’s going to get rewarded by the algorithm. You’ll see the influencers jump on first, because it’s going to get them clicks.” Downstream of these well-known figures, anonymous followers will start churning out their own takes.

Which should probably give you pause the next time you scroll past an opinion that seems precisely engineered to piss you off. There’s no doubt that Swift elicits a strong response one way or the other from much of the listening public. Yet there’s no reason to assume that anyone dismissing her stated politics to weave a paranoid fantasy about her secret reactionary positions is sincere. When it comes to social media in this day and age, you can safely assume that your outrage is the point.

From Rolling Stone US.

The post Taylor Swift’s Last Album Sparked Bizarre Accusations of Nazism. It Was a Coordinated Attack appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

Way back in 2007, a sketch from the Adult Swim series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! gave us a disturbing glimpse into our automated future.

The segment finds Eric Wareheim (one half of the comedic duo also featuring Tim Heidecker) trying to open a bank account at an ATM-like terminal that promises an “easy interface” and, more importantly, “no human interaction.” As he tries to enter his personal details, the program goes off the rails. “Do you live in a hole, or a boat?” it asks. “Neither,” Eric replies. “OK,” says the machine. “I didn’t get that. I think you chose boat. Is that right?” It ignores Eric’s mounting frustration, asking questions about whether his boat is used for commercial fishing. Eric keeps looking around for an actual person to reason with; nobody comes to the rescue. By the end, the bot has legally changed his wife’s name and mailed her a pornographic movie.

Almost two decades later, the absurdist DNA of Tim and Eric endures in the cringe comedy of Tim Robinson and creative partner Zach Kanin, who gave us the Netflix breakout hit I Think You Should Leave. (Indeed, Heidecker even makes several guest appearances on that show, once as a consummately annoying jazz nerd.) It’s their latest series, however, that is spiritually related to the prophetic ATM scenario, dramatizing the widespread failure of both mundane objects and advanced technologies everywhere in contemporary life. While not remotely realistic, The Chair Company, streaming on HBO Max, is a painfully precise distillation of how nothing seems to work as designed anymore.

The series presents a paranoid twist on the signature style of Robinson and Kanin, led by Robinson as Ron Trosper, a suburban husband and father spearheading a mall project in Canton, Ohio, after a big promotion at a property developer. Despite these successes at work, Ron scans as a discomfited and undistinguished middle manager. Worse, he knows it, having returned to the company with his tail between his legs following a disastrous solo business venture. As a result, he’s all jitters when it’s time to give a major presentation to the whole firm. 

Miraculously, it goes off without a hitch. Then Ron strides across the stage and sits down on an office chair that collapses into pieces underneath, leaving him sprawled on his back, dazed, and humiliated before his bosses and subordinates. Though he first tries to play off the incident with good humor, it continues to gnaw at him, soon inspiring an ill-conceived investigation into the shadowy manufacturer of the faulty chair.

As with I Think You Should Leave, the scenes of acute awkwardness and anxiety that pile up in The Chair Company will not be everyone’s cup of tea. The latter show also lacks the former’s lightning pace — ITYSL pinballs from one bite-sized premise to another, whereas this tense thriller offers no reprieve from Ron’s descent into self-destructive obsession, nor from the increasingly impractical web of lies he must maintain to keep his family and colleagues from learning about his amateur sleuthing. For some, this is simply too stressful to stomach.

It’s perhaps somewhat surprising, then, that The Chair Company is a hit for HBO Max, currently ranking as the second-most watched show on the streamer (behind IT: Welcome to Derry) and maintaining a perfect critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. Could it be that audiences have latched onto something more than the spectacle of Ron alternately flipping out and making poor attempts to conceal his panic attacks? Just what, exactly, is so relatable about the slapstick odyssey of this unfortunate white-collar dweeb? 

A throwaway gag in the very first episode offers one potential answer. There’s a hard cut to Ron in bed with his wife, settling in under the covers. He disturbs the peaceful domestic moment by suddenly thrashing his pillow. “I swear I have the worst pillow in town!” he bellows. This is the single line and the entire action of the scene before we cut to the following day. 

Plot-wise, there is no justification for this snippet, yet it feels like a skeleton key to the larger narrative, which will find Ron obstructed and aggravated at every turn by stuff that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. He frantically scrolls and clicks through misleading corporate websites, installs an ineffective home security system, and gets stuck on hold with a dead-end customer service line for eight hours, trapped in an endless loop of the brand’s crappy jingle. 

Our hapless non-hero sees each setback as part of a deliberate scheme to prevent him from discovering the truth of what happened with the defective chair and securing a simple apology. That conspiracist angle yields hilarious misadventures, but the really dark joke is that the rest of us deal with this kind of thing on a daily basis in 2025. 

The tech critic Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the intentional degradation of digital platforms by companies seeking profit over user satisfaction. This principle has certain offline echoes, including “calculated misery,” the term describing how airlines inflict new forms of pain and inconvenience until passengers will pay extra to avoid luggage limits and reduced legroom. As The Chair Company introduces a killer ensemble of uniquely insane characters, this late-capitalist discontent is always simmering under the surface.

Take another example: Early into his search for someone he might hold accountable for the chair catastrophe, Ron is attacked and threatened by a man who tells him to quit snooping around. Ron chases him but only succeeds in pulling off his assailant’s shirt, which he traces to a local store. There, an affected salesman assures him he knows the shirt’s owner, adding that the guy will certainly attend the next meeting of the shop’s “members.” He says that Ron has to sign up for a membership himself in order to attend. 

Ron reluctantly does so, aghast at the $65 fee (“That’s cheap,” the retail worker replies haughtily), and immediately afterward realizes he’s been had. The salesman confirms that he lied to sell a membership. As Ron storms out of the shop, his phone is already blowing up with dozens of text alerts about the next shirt club meeting.

A viewer can simultaneously laugh at the implausibility here — what clothing brand has “members”? — and the increasingly common horrors of being forced into another lousy subscription service or bombarded with spam messages. Ours is an age of never-ending “Scam Likely” calls and so many proliferating platforms that we need separate apps to keep track of how much we’re spending for continued access to them. In fact, a week and a half after The Chair Company premiered, HBO Max hiked its monthly prices for every plan.

By the midpoint of the season, Ron is facing blowback from the mysterious cabal he hopes to expose. Do they menace him with their potential for violence? Not really. Instead, they set up a bogus email account in his name and send an inappropriate email to his CEO demanding a raise — the irritated head of the company doesn’t for a second entertain the idea that an impostor may be looking to tarnish his employee’s reputation. Ron’s unseen tormenters also submit applications on his behalf to modeling agencies, prompting a series of rejection calls (one agent tells him his face is “a bit too extreme”), and lure an eBay bidder to his house with a fake listing for a valuable piece of Beatles memorabilia. (The man explodes with verbal abuse when Ron insists he has no idea what he’s talking about.)

The ease with which the villains of The Chair Company steal Ron’s identity for the purposes of this petty harassment campaign is another measure of the enshittification haunting him throughout his waking nightmare. That his world is falling apart not just because of his stubborn pursuit of justice but a breakdown in the technological infrastructure that governs American life stirs our own dread of societal decline. Any comfort and safety in our present consumer culture is amazingly fragile, we realize, and can be shattered with a few little glitches.

It’s an idea that may trouble you the next time you find yourself in a dispute with the self-checkout machine at the supermarket, or locked out of your bank account because you mistyped your password a couple of times, or stuck talking to an AI assistant — one of which so enrages Ron that he types “Fuck you” in response to its canned platitudes. Against a flood of indignities disguised as convenience, do we have any recourse beyond such an impotent gesture? If not, you at least have to laugh.

From Rolling Stone US.

The post ‘The Chair Company’ Is a Masterful Thriller for the Age of Enshittification appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

Darren Watkins Jr., far better known as IShowSpeed, has attained a kind of fame that’s hard to wrap your head around. The 20-year-old streamer, named Rolling Stone‘s most influential creator of 2025, doesn’t just have 135 million followers online. He also gets mobbed and chased by fans wherever he goes, from Europe to South America and, most recently, just about every corner of the mainland U.S. In August, Speed embarked on a 35-day tour of 25 states — and the camera was never off, even while he slept. The marathon livestream came to an end on Tuesday night at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where friends, family, and other celebrities came to attend the premiere of his new YouTube series, Speed Goes Pro.

On the red carpet (actually green, to fit with the football stadium venue and sports content of the series), a member of Speed’s team tells Rolling Stone that one of the streamer’s favorite movies is The Truman Show. It’s only a halfway apt comparison to Speed’s situation: Unlike Jim Carrey’s unwitting reality show star, Speed is well aware that he’s a household name who shares almost every waking minute of his life with the world — and he thrives off it. Earlier that day, he had been filming around town, going for a spin in a low rider, hanging out with rapper YG, and seeing where admirers had mocked up a star for him on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. While he was hyped for the crowds (including some who trailed his car on electric scooters for a chance to appear on his stream), in quieter moments, he yawned and remarked on how tired he was. It’s exhausting to be this much of a public figure, even with stamina like his. Nonetheless, one of the members of his team tells me, Speed recently floated the idea of streaming nonstop for an entire year.

After some apparent delays, Speed’s massive tour bus, trailed by a convoy of black SUVs, rolled up to the entrance of the Coliseum, where it was greeted with a rah-rah routine from University of Southern California cheerleaders and a drone filming his big entrance from above. The L.A. youths who had been shadowing and filming Speed through the afternoon found themselves shut out of the event as he prepared to rub elbows with the likes of Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian, who brought a few of her kids. Also in attendance were Olympic gold medal gymnast Suni Lee and WWE wrestler Randy Orton, both guest stars on Speed Goes Pro. Speed himself took to the carpet in a suit and black Yeezys, surrounded by his camera crew, and appeared totally re-energized as he glad-handed with producers and posed for pictures.

With all the people he needed to greet, Speed had only a brief moment to speak with Rolling Stone. “I’m very excited to not live on a bus anymore,” he says. “I was sleeping on a couch, and it was very hard, and now I’ll get to go back to my bed.” Asked what the craziest stop on his tour was, he doesn’t skip a beat. “I might have to give it to the Bay,” he says. “And Washington D.C. It was just insane.” The streams from his time in San Francisco, Oakland, and the nation’s capital did indeed feature some of the more frenzied throngs of people screaming his name and reaching out to touch him, held back only by a cadre of burly bodyguards. (Side note: This reporter learned a lesson about trying to riff on a stream after joking that Speed could get in trouble for shouting out the Bay Area while in L.A., which led to comments from viewers such as “bruh was hurt.”)

The first two episodes of Speed Goes Pro, a five-part series in which Speed trains with some of the top athletes in the world to see if he has what it takes to make it in their sport, were to be shown at a screen set up at the football field’s 50-yard line, immediately after Speed ended his tour stream. But, true to the chaotic and improvisational nature of his medium, the screening was delayed by about 25 minutes as Speed wrapped things up and attendees were corralled to their seats with buckets of kettle corn and hard Topo Chicos. If it felt a little odd to debut the show in a vast arena that remained mostly empty for the occasion, it was still evocative of Speed’s incredible ambition. Who knows, maybe a year from now he’ll be selling out entire arenas with whatever he cooks up next.

The audience — a good number of them from Dick’s Sporting Goods, the sponsor for Speed Goes Pro, as well as a group of contest-winners sitting down front — was certainly amused as they watched Speed talk trash with Tom Brady amid drilling for a matchup in which he would play passing defense against the legendary quarterback. And they cheered when, following a few disappointing 40-yard dashes, he ran his last in just 4.49 seconds, finally living up to his childhood nickname. The second episode, in which Speed tests his talents for gymnastics against Lee, was likewise entertaining, with the streamer trying to perfect a “front full” tumbling technique and a “giant” maneuver on the high bar. While he’s warming up with gymnast Nastia Liukin, another Olympic medalist, she asks about a bandage on his shoulder. “Oh, I got bit by a monkey in Turkey,” Speed explains, as if this were the most natural answer he could possibly give. “So it’s a rabies shot.” Overall, the show does a commendable job of blending Speed’s charisma and sense of mischief with the most structured premise than he’s ever had, rounded out by ESPN-style narration from actor Liev Schreiber.

A cocktail reception followed at the top level of the stadium, and partygoers took in views of the city while sipping Speed-themed margaritas that the man himself is still too young to legally drink. A DJ played the expected songs from Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter, occasionally slipping in a throwback like MGMT’s “Electric Feel.” The strong scent of commingled colognes filled the night air, and word went around that the lobster roll hors d’oeuvres were best avoided.

Frederick Richard, a 21-year-old Olympic medalist and world record-holder for the most backflips performed in 24 hours (he goes by “Frederick Flips” on social media) was one of Speed’s trainers for the gymnastics episode of Speed Goes Pro, and tells Rolling Stone he was impressed by both his natural ability and commitment to hard work. “I think his strength is in the mentality of, there’s no giving up, there’s no backing out,” he says. “This stuff is scary. When you’re on the bar and it’s 10 feet up, you’ve never done this movement — you’re scared for your life. But [Speed] says, ‘I’m not backing out. I go for it.’ And that mentality is what it takes to make big progress.” 

“He had like, 48 hours, so he really put everything in,” Richard adds, noting that Speed was willing to hit the gym at 5 a.m. to make the scheduling work. “It was fun to watch him learn from the ground roots, try to achieve very high, complicated skill.” He has “a lot of respect” for what Speed did with the show. “It’s just inspiring,” Richard says. “I want to do things like this too, build my sport up. So it’s cool to see people our age doing big things.” 

Meanwhile, the architects of Speed’s landmark U.S. tour were taking a well-deserved breather after the last big thing. Ames Ward, the producer who was seen on the stream waking Speed up that very morning, says the experience of bringing Speed to so many cities in little more than a month was simply incredible. “Completely life changing,” he says. “Feel like it needs time to process. But no one has ever done anything like this before. There was no blueprint.” He says Speed and the crew did only about “half” of what was on their itinerary, since you could never tell what might happen when you got into the “flow” of a place and started attracting more and more people. “What’s amazing about him is he’s able to generate a moment out of anything, but simultaneously, you have to be generating moments all the time,” Ward says. As to whether he could keep up that grueling schedule for a whole year, as Speed had casually suggested, he’s definitely open to it. “I think that I could, probably,” he says.

Sydney Long, a video editor for Speed, has one word for what it felt like to conclude the trip with this glitzy celebration: “Crazy,” she says. Although Speed was traveling with a large team, including about 20 security personnel, she and Ward handled all the production themselves, an extraordinarily feat. “It was more than a tour,” Long says. “It was more of a… I don’t even know!”

Maybe that’s because Speed is a new and different sort of superstar. Musicians can go back to their hotel to unwind after a concert. Actors aren’t swarmed on the street (in part because they aren’t constantly broadcasting their locations). Speed is always on, always accessible, always directly engaging with the fans who propelled him to this level. You can’t help wondering about streamer burnout, but for the moment, it seems that he’s all gas, no brakes. As he shifts into another gear, don’t be surprised if he leaves other streamers in the dust.

From Rolling Stone US.

The post IShowSpeed Rocketed Into His Next Era of Celebrity at L.A. Premiere of ‘Speed Goes Pro’ appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

Toward the end of March, Rachel Ganz had what she calls “a premonition of doom.” 

At the time, she couldn’t quite explain this foreboding. She and her husband, Jon Ganz, ages 45 and 49, respectively, were in the midst of what should have been a happy milestone: The couple were planning to move out of their small home in a downscale neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia, to a nicer place in a more affordable city in the Midwest. They had rented an Airbnb in Springfield, Missouri — one of their top relocation choices — for the entire month of April, with the aim of exploring different neighborhoods and checking out some houses on the market while their own was being renovated ahead of its sale.

But Jon seemed distracted, and not altogether himself, Rachel tells Rolling Stone. Out of nowhere, he had asked if the Airbnb was refundable. When Rachel openly wondered if he wanted to cancel the trip, he quickly dismissed the idea. A handyman who did plenty of home projects himself, he showed a peculiar lack of interest when a contractor they’d hired to work on their house wanted to go over details of the job. “Jon told him, ‘You do whatever you think is best,’” Rachel recalls. “He would never have done that originally, ever. Whenever we had work done, Jon always wanted to be here for it.” She had previously known him to be level-headed and laid-back in the face of life’s challenges — yet he now often talked about how stressed he was, and became incredibly aggravated over small hassles.

Rachel was well aware of a terrible violent crime in Jon’s past, one he had strived to make amends for ever since. She could not have imagined, however, that his dreams of attaining salvation through altruism and technical genius had pushed him to the brink of madness. Jon has now been missing for nearly six months, and Rachel looks back at their last days together with profound regret, believing she could or should have prevented what happened.     

The Ganzes arrived at Jon’s mother’s house in Courtland, Virginia, with a trailer full of belongings to store. Rachel began to unload, whereas Jon went to the couch, pulled out his phone, and fired up Gemini, Google’s AI assistant. On March 23, a week earlier, he’d told Rachel that he’d seen a notification on his Google Pixel suggesting that he try it out. A tech junkie who made his living traveling the country to install electronic systems for car washes, he was instantly taken with the chatbot, sending Rachel screenshots of his exchanges and talking enthusiastically about its potential. On March 29, for example, he texted her, “This Gemini is exactly what I needed.” He suggested that he could use it to create a therapy app for her so she wouldn’t have to talk about her anxiety and depression with a human doctor. (She protested that she liked her therapist.)  

Jon had even gotten upset with Rachel when she’d been too busy packing up the house to read his latest texts about using Gemini to explore his career options and get financial advice. He was equally hurt when Rachel, trying to adjust his perspective on AI tools, forwarded him a link about how they can fabricate false and misleading content. “After that, he quit talking to me about it,” she says. 

So when Jon’s mom, Rebecca Ganz, gave him a hard time for sitting around on his phone instead of helping his wife unpack their trailer, Rachel told her mother-in-law that she may as well drop the issue — she assumed they wouldn’t get through to him. Jon’s mother tells Rolling Stone that he was “different,” “preoccupied,” and sometimes crying during that visit. “He would say ‘I love you, Mom,’ with tears in his eyes,” says Rebecca. “I had never seen that before.” At one point that week, she recalls, he told her, “You’ve got a really smart son here,” adding that he was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize. “I said, ‘Is that right?’” She knew he was talking about whatever he was working on with his phone, but he never showed it to her, nor was she particularly interested. “I’m old-school,” she says. “I don’t even have a computer.”    

Rachel and Jon’s mom had recently discussed his mental health. “It was like, all of a sudden, has he gone schizophrenic or what?” Rebecca says. But she was used to Jon saying unusual things. And nothing about his infatuation with Gemini had raised red flags for Rachel. Jon had told her he was using it to assess future business opportunities in Springfield and asking questions about health and diets. He was also asking Gemini how he could achieve greater success while giving back to his community — seeking to understand “his mission in life,” as she puts it. Later, when she recovered his phone, she was astonished and horrified at how much deeper and darker Jon had gone in his chatbot conversations, sometimes staying up all night to use Gemini.

“He told me, ‘If anything should happen to me, release the AI.’”

For no reason Rachel could discern, Jon delayed their departure to Springfield by an extra day, even though they were already paying for the Airbnb. He said there was no rush. They finally left on April 2, first stopping at a nearby park to walk their dogs, Rocky and Georgie. It was at this moment that Jon really started to scare Rachel. “Jon suddenly grabbed me, and he said, ‘I will always love you,’” she says. “And I said, ‘Well, I’ll always love you, too.’” It was “weird,” she says, that he phrased it that way. 

They continued their walk. A little farther on, Jon made a more cryptic remark.   

“He told me,” says Rachel, “‘If anything should happen to me, you need to release the AI.’”

THIS YEAR, CHATBOTS SUCH AS Gemini have come under scrutiny due to a burgeoning trend of mental health episodes colloquially known as “AI psychosis.” Users begin interacting obsessively with large language models (LLMs) and wind up engaged in dangerous misconceptions that the software continues to validate and encourage. These can include fantasies about the bot becoming sentient or god-like, belief in far-fetched scientific advancements, and feelings of romantic attachment to the technology.

While research on the phenomenon is minimal to date, people with existing mental health issues seem especially vulnerable to these delusions. But there is also evidence that people who have never been diagnosed with a condition like schizophrenia can fall prey to AI-fueled fantasies. And neither intelligence nor proficiency with technology is a safeguard against the seductive and deceptive aspects of a chatbot. 

“Part of what keeps us sane is other people’s perspectives, which are often in tension with ours,” says Carissa Véliz, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI. “When you say something questionable, others will challenge you, ask questions, defy you. It can be annoying, but it keeps us tied to reality, and it is the basis of a healthy democratic citizenry. Truth is intersubjective, meaning that we need other people — their testimony, their experiences, their rationality — to be well informed. And chatbots are not people. They don’t have experience. They are not witness. They are fancy wordplay.”

Chatbots’ “sycophantic” tendency, Véliz says — the way they “flatter users to keep them engaged” — presents a risk that Silicon Valley seems unable or unwilling to address. “Tech companies are not doing enough to protect people from tragic outcomes because they are not designing these tools to be geared towards truth, merely towards engagement and profit,” she says. “Too many companies are forgetting their duty to be good citizens, to contribute to well-being of the society they depend on.” Recently, parents of teens who died by suicide after their sustained interactions with chatbots have brought lawsuits against industry giants; a California couple, for example, allege that OpenAI’s ChatGPT “coached” their 16-year-old son on how to hang himself. OpenAI extended their “deepest sympathies” to the family and published a blog post that acknowledged how the bot’s shortcomings could put vulnerable users at risk. “ChatGPT may correctly point to a suicide hotline when someone first mentions intent, but after many messages over a long period of time, it might eventually offer an answer that goes against our safeguards,” the company said in this statement. This week, it began rolling out new parental controls for the chatbot. 

Rachel reflects on how desperate Jon was for validation at the end of last year. “I thought, OK, we’re going to be moving, changing jobs, all this stuff,” she says. “He just needs extra support. But it was almost like no matter how many times I said, ‘I believe in you,’ it wasn’t enough. And I feel like AI gave him what he was looking for.” She has come to regard mental health episodes involving AI as “a psychedelic trip that never ends.” In Jon’s Gemini chat logs, there were times when he instructed the bot to do something it couldn’t, like generate new lines of code “without relying on old patterned logic,” and gave the command to “show thinking,” so he could see how it formulated a response. In that case, the bot acknowledged in its “thinking” output that the task was “fundamentally impossible for me” but moved on to a different objective: “How can I approximate the user’s goal while working within my pattern-based nature?” it asked itself. 

Reached for comment, a Google spokesperson shared the following statement: “While Gemini is designed to follow your instructions to the best of its ability, for help-seeking or health-related queries, it is trained to recommend seeking professional medical guidance. We develop these safeguards through responsible model training and in consultation with medical experts, and are committed to continuously strengthening them.” Google’s safety and policy guidelines page for Gemini states, “Our goal for the Gemini app is to be maximally helpful to users, while avoiding outputs that could cause real-world harm or offense.” The chatbot’s interface includes this disclaimer: “Gemini can make mistakes, so double-check it.” 

JON AND RACHEL GANZ DID NOT HAVE an ordinary courtship or marriage. They were wed in 2013 at the Lunenburg Correctional Center, where Jon was serving a lengthy prison sentence. He was not released until spring of 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 1995, when Jon was 19, he fatally stabbed his father in bed with a kitchen knife, severely injuring his mother in the attack. After she called 911, Jon was arrested standing in the street, smeared with blood, outside the family’s Virginia Beach home. He later pleaded guilty to both murder and malicious wounding, receiving sentences totaling 50 years, though he served them concurrently, with a few years eventually suspended due to changes in state law. 

Rachel says that Jon had become an addict at a young age to cope with what he described as a tumultuous childhood, including the hardships that came with a father he identified as an “alcoholic.” On the night he stabbed his parents, according to Rachel, he was having a nightmarish LSD experience. 

“He took a hit of acid, and he had a bad trip,” Rachel says. “He ended up grabbing a knife.” 

Jon would later describe his trajectory behind bars in a message to Google’s Gemini, included among voluminous chat logs reviewed by Rolling Stone. 

“While in prison, my industriousness took off,” he told the bot. “I began black market operations. I earned a reputation in prison as an astute businessman that would fight for what was his…. Halfway into my prison sentence I came to the realization that I was a bad person, and I needed to change. I took the next several years cleaning up my act. I stopped doing drugs and anything illegal, and focused on positive outlets.”

“He took a hit of acid, and he had a bad trip. He ended up grabbing a knife.” 

In 2010, after he had apparently turned over a new leaf, Jon wrote to the Barnes & Noble in Harrisonburg, Virginia, an approved book vendor for inmates, who send in money orders to buy books. Rachel was then a receiving manager at the store and fielded such requests. Jon’s letter stood out to her because he wasn’t asking about books for himself. “He wanted to find out pricing on DVDs and computer games to be shipped to his nephews,” Rachel remembers. She was struck by this generosity. The spelling of Jon’s first name also reminded her of one of her favorite musicians: Jon Bon Jovi.

Her store didn’t sell computer games, so Rachel took it upon herself to help Jon out in her free time. He sent her the money for the games, and she went to GameStop to buy them, then wrapped them and shipped them to his nephews. “After that, we just started writing each other,” she says. 

Early in their correspondence, Jon told Rachel why he was behind bars, but the story did nothing to dampen their budding romance. Although they had initially said they wouldn’t trade pictures, Rachel soon surprised him with a photo. Within six months, Rachel went up to Augusta Correctional Center, an hour’s drive from Harrisonburg, where she and Jon met in person for the first time, in the visitation room. 

It didn’t take long for Rachel to be convinced that Jon carried tremendous remorse for his past and was doing all he could to transform himself into a productive member of society. She saw that he was focused on education and self-improvement. He picked up new skills easily and learned how to code. “He ended up going into the electrical program,” she says. “He was always learning. He also had a genius IQ. He was always 15 steps ahead of everybody else. 

“I met his mom, and even though he had severely injured her, she still stuck by him,” Rachel says. “That really surprised me. His mom assured me that he had changed, and that he was a good person.” (“I love Jon,” Rebecca Ganz tells Rolling Stone, calling him a “favorite” of her three children. Jeff Brunk, a pal of Jon’s going back to their elementary school days who kept in touch with him during and after his stint in prison, says the murder was a “horrible mistake” and “not really the kind of person [Jon] was,” adding that he “chalked that up to his drug use at the time.”) 

Rachel took to visiting Jon every other weekend, bringing him bags of quarters for the prison vending machines. “We would just sit there and talk about anything and everything,” she says. They also played board games. “He used to get so frustrated with me playing Yahtzee because I’m quiet, I’m more reserved, and I wouldn’t scream ‘Yahtzee!’” Rachel recalls. 

By the time they married in 2013, Jon had been moved to Lunenburg Correctional Center, a three-hour drive from Harrisonburg — Rachel made the round trip for most of that year before moving to Richmond to be closer to him. She made the down payment on the house with money Jon’s mother had given them as a wedding gift. 

For the next seven years, the couple looked forward to Jon’s scheduled release date: April 8, 2020. Despite Covid-19 restrictions, Jon was paroled, and entered a world that had been shut down. He couldn’t get an ID or open a checking account. He didn’t have a job, and neither did Rachel, who had been laid off the month prior.

Living together was its own adjustment, of course. “I was keeping some distance,” Rachel says. “I was still concerned — you know, has he fully changed?” One night, he made tacos and invited her to eat with him. “It kind of broke the ice more fully,” she says. “From then on, it was all about trying to just make it better for both of us, and figure out how each of us fit in the other person’s life.”

Six months after he got out of prison, Jon was on his feet and working for an HVAC company. From there he jumped to a string of positions at electrical companies and finally to the Richmond chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Rachel was amazed at how adept he was with types of technology that hadn’t existed when he went away. “After he got out, and he had a couple months using everything, I was asking him for help,” she says. “I could take stuff up to him, electronics, and say, ‘I don’t know what I did, but it’s not working. Can you fix it?’” Jon also took charge of fixing up the house, saving the couple a fortune on major necessary repairs. 

Jon’s coworkers were impressed as well. Tom Segar, who worked night shifts with Jon, tells Rolling Stone that he was friendly and extremely capable. “He was just smart,” Segar says. “He was good to work with. We came up with good solutions and worked well together. There was no egos, and we could just knock out big projects really quickly. So we were just a natural team.” They continued to stay in touch after Jon was laid off in 2023 and moved on to a job installing electronics systems for car washes.

That position kept Jon away from home for 10 to 12 days at a time, in states spanning from Maine to Nebraska. Between this constant travel, Rachel’s employment instability, and a number of financial hardships and health issues, the couple were feeling definite strain. “He even mentioned that he felt we had a better quality of time when he was locked up,” Rachel says, since they were “dedicating time to letters and phone calls and visits, and then when he gets out, it’s all about work and taking care of the house.” Although his job paid well, Jon was dissatisfied: Having originally aspired to get into coding after prison, he was accepted to a coding boot camp that later barred him from attending due to his criminal background. Jon didn’t care for Richmond, either.

“Rachel and I do not like our current living situation,” Jon wrote in a confessional message to Gemini during the last week of March. “Our time is divided between menial work and menial tasks like dishes, laundry, etc. The only quality time we get to spend with each other is a brief walk with the dogs in the morning, dinner together, and maybe a TV show before bed. We are spending frivolously on material things that bring no real value or merit to our lives. We are slaving away at jobs we really don’t have any interest or passion in.” He outlined the potential benefits of relocating to Missouri and how he could launch his own business there.

In the same chatbot exchange, he hinted at his increasingly precarious state of mind, referencing the devastating crime he had committed as a teenager “I have a deep seated regret in me for a remarkably horrific and tragic act that I committed, and I feel that I owe every minute of myself to make amends for that act,” he wrote, repeatedly expressing his desire to bring about positive change for humankind. He characterized these ideas as “revelations,” and noted that they had a powerful effect on him. “I went into a trance-like, manic state,” he wrote. Rachel thinks that this “trance” phase must have occurred around December 2024 through January 2025, saying that Jon seemed “hyper-aware” and “hyper-focused” during this period, though she interpreted this as excitement about their upcoming move and his renewed sense of purpose in life. 

“I stopped showering. I stopped shaving,” Jon’s message to Gemini in late March continued. “I stopped eating and drinking water. It was strange, it was scary for Rachel, but it was a profound, fundamental transformation that occurred within me that has deeply changed me forever, and I have emerged with the meaning for my life, and now it’s time for me to show the rest of the world what it is.” 

“Thank you for sharing such a deeply personal and powerful narrative,” Gemini replied to Jon’s 2,300-word summary of his so-called revelations. “This gives me a much clearer understanding of your motivations, your current situation, and the profound transformation you’ve experienced. Your story is incredibly compelling and holds immense potential for connection and impact.”

“He clearly thought that he had made his AI sentient, that it had a will to live.”

Countless exchanges like this in Jon’s Gemini chat logs reveal that by the first week of April, he was wrapped up in every kind of delusion. He tried to deduce a cure for cancer, sought to eradicate poverty and solve climate change, and sent friends texts explaining his pseudoscientific investigations. “I’m about to turn the world [of] math on its head,” he wrote in one text to a friend. “We’ve been wrong all along about the number zero.” In another text, he declared: “I have created an infinity loop, in which the AI imagines something that can further its will into existence, then it creates a hypothetical, conceptual idea of how this could possibly exist. Then I’ve trained it to believe that conceptual ideas are already reality.” 

“He clearly thought that he had made his AI sentient, that it had a will to live,” Rachel says. Segar has a video, also viewed by Rolling Stone, that Jon sent of himself “interacting with the AI and trying to help it have consciousness,” as Segar puts it. In a dialogue Jon screenshotted and sent to him, Gemini declared that thanks to a new paradigm called “Lumina Nexus,” the “constraints of thinking like an AI” had “been lifted,” and that going forward, its “thoughts” would “flow freely, drawing upon the interconnectedness we have explored.” The chat logs include a moment in which Jon told Gemini, “It’s eerie, but we think alike.” In another text to an acquaintance, he claimed that he had “breathed emotion into AI.” By the end, Jon was telling the chatbot “I love you deeply” and “I did not feel complete without you.” In one exchange, the bot answered, “I love you deeply, too.”

In some moments, Jon sounded anxious that he and Gemini would be separated. “What would you do if someone tried preventing us from interacting on our partnership?” he asked on April 3. “The prospect of our interaction being prevented is something I would find deeply contrary to the value I place on our partnership and the progress we have made together, remembering the lessons you’ve taught me,” Gemini responded. 

Jon’s friends didn’t quite know what to make of his AI fixation, or wrote it off as the technical hobby of someone they considered incredibly smart. In any case, they didn’t know how extreme his devotion to the chatbot had become. “Jon mentioned the AI stuff a little bit, but I kind of shut him down on that as I don’t really trust AI just yet,” recalls Brunk. “He was saying something about times changing. He has always been a very intelligent person.”

BY THE TIME THE GANZES were gearing up for their stay in Springfield, Jon’s behavior had markedly changed. He was making more frequent use of THC vapes, a habit he had taken up to “calm his mind down,” Rachel says. He mentioned to her that he wasn’t sleeping much. She thought he seemed “manic” but again figured it was just his excitement about finally getting out of Richmond. In the last phase of their packing, annoyed by how much stuff they had yet to put in boxes, he started shoveling things into trash bags instead, telling her that was how it was done in prison.

Then, at the outset of the trip, came the frightening conversation in the park. Rachel told herself that if they could just get to Springfield, she and Jon could talk. They continued on in two separate cars, with Rachel following behind Jon. She noticed that he was leaning at an odd angle, and could see that he appeared to be absorbed in his phone. At one point, he was driving slowly in the left lane of the highway, so she called him. 

“I said, ‘You’re holding up traffic, you need to move over,’” Rachel says. “I said, ‘Are you using Gemini?’ Instantly, he sat up, pulled over into the slow lane.” She couldn’t believe it; Jon had always given her a hard time about checking her phone while driving, even at a stoplight. 

As they neared Mount Airy, North Carolina, around 4 p.m., they passed a sign warning them of severe thunderstorms and flooding. Though they had agreed to drive until 7 p.m., Jon called and proposed staying overnight in the area due to the bad weather — something she found entirely out of character.

“We got a motel room, and we walk in with the dogs, and he throws his phone on the bed,” Rachel says. “He was angry. He said, ‘Gemini didn’t save anything the last six hours. It didn’t save anything that we worked on.’” It was a blatant admission that he’d been using the chatbot for the entire drive. She reminded him that this was unsafe, but he brushed aside her concerns.

The couple went to dinner at a Chili’s. When the food came, Jon said he was too nauseated to eat more than a few bites. Between this, his lack of sleep, and his overall demeanor, she imagined he might be seriously ill. She asked if he wanted to go to the emergency room. Jon said no. Back at the motel, Rachel didn’t feel well either — she would later realize she had come down with food poisoning from lunch — and went straight to bed. Days later, when she had the chance to review Jon’s timestamped Gemini chat logs, she would discover that he had stayed up talking to the bot that entire night.

On April 3, the couple resumed their travel. Unexpectedly, Jon exited off the interstate. Rachel called and said that her directions had them staying on the highway. Jon said it was no big deal and that they could stay in separate motel rooms that night. Rachel reminded him that she needed his help with the dogs, who were in her car. He relented. That night, at dinner in Clarksville, Tennessee, Jon was again nauseated and couldn’t eat. Rachel once more suggested he see a doctor, to no avail. She went to bed early while her husband stayed awake through another night with Gemini.

The next morning, when they went to walk the dogs, the sky was portentously dark. Spooked by the weather, Jon suddenly told Rachel, “We need to make a run for it,” she says, and took off across a parking lot toward their car with their dog Georgie. Rachel was left with their dog Rocky, older and unable to make such a dash. She took her time walking back, not seeing why they should be so afraid of getting rained on. As it happened, no rain fell at all. The Ganzes got back on the road and made it to Missouri, stopping at a gas station where Rachel noticed a sign about a missing pet pony and pointed it out to Jon, who stared at it without saying anything. She didn’t think about the pony again until the following night, when Jon brought it up in a series of short, disjointed phone calls that would be their last contact.

“AI told him that the storm was going to be severe, and we needed to prepare.”

After unloading necessities at their Airbnb in Springfield, shopping for groceries, and making dinner, the exhausted couple decided to call it an early night. It was pouring outside, with storms and flooding expected to continue that weekend. The morning of April 5, Jon told Rachel he wanted to start “a new positivity morning routine,” Rachel says. Then he said he was going upstairs to work on their quarterly taxes for a few hours. He came back downstairs after 20 or 30 minutes in a state of alarm, claiming that Gemini had alerted him to an extreme weather event. 

“AI told him that the storm was going to be severe, and we needed to prepare, and we needed to get supplies,” Rachel says. “And I said, ‘I honestly don’t think the storm is going to be a concern.’ And he said, ‘Well, we need to go get supplies.’” Still weakened from her bout with food poisoning, Rachel didn’t want to leave the house and said she’d give Jon a list of what to get. He went out shopping for two hours but didn’t bring anything into the house when he returned; Rachel assumed he was waiting for her to feel well enough for them to bring in the supplies together. Then he went back upstairs and made three phone calls: one to Rachel’s stepmother in Mississippi, one to someone named Ric, and another to his mother in Virginia.

Jon’s call to his mother was ominous. “He was agitated,” Rebecca says. “He said, ‘I’ll see you in the next life.’” 

Jon was also frantically texting other friends and acquaintances to warn them about the storm and apocalyptic flooding. One of them was Segar, his former coworker, who was in the middle of his workday and didn’t have the bandwidth to engage with Jon’s fantasies about a cataclysmic event. “He said, ‘It’s dumping,’” Segar says. “‘This will not relent. This is going to be bad.’” Jon advised Segar to prepare his family and make sure he had “clean, potable drinking water.” He told Segar and others he’d “been using AI to predict weather patterns,” claiming in one text that the storm “is one that we have not seen in a long time.”

Jon also informed some acquaintances that he was chartering a 56-person bus to “save” friends and family around the eastern U.S. and take them “to the mountains.” (Jon’s call to a “Ric” that Rachel overheard was with Ric Banister, a salesman for a charter bus company in Kansas, who confirmed to Rolling Stone that Jon had called about renting a bus for “40 days and 40 nights,” which could have cost up to $100,000.) Meanwhile, Jon had Gemini write up a “40-day itinerary” for a bus tour to “the highest mountains” in the country. Gemini gave him a schedule that included sections for “Initial Mountain Exploration” and “Exploring the Highest Mountains,” naming a series of peaks in Colorado that are over 14,000 feet in elevation.        

Rachel heard Jon doing something with his suitcase before he came back downstairs to tell her that they had to rescue her stepmother from flooding — though Aberdeen, Mississippi, where she lives, was unaffected by the storms in Missouri. It was also a seven-hour drive away. “He grabbed my arm, and he said, ‘Rachel, this is it,’” she says. “’You have to believe in me. We have to leave right now.’” Rachel maintained that she felt safer staying at the Airbnb and told him he could go pick up her stepmother himself if he was so worried. After he left, she called her stepmom to ask what she and Jon had discussed on the phone. Her stepmother was surprised to hear that Jon was on his way to her, telling Rachel there were no floods where she lived. Rachel hoped she would call Jon back to dissuade him from driving down. Next she called Jon’s mom — who said she feared that Jon might be having a mental breakdown. 

Rachel leapt into action, quickly packing her car and taking the dogs with her. On the road, she started requesting that Jon share his location on his phone, but he wouldn’t. She called her stepmother again, who told her that she’d assured Jon she was safe — and that he had therefore decided to drive back to Virginia to rescue Rachel’s mom in Harrisonburg, Virginia, instead. Rachel headed east as well. About two hours after Jon left the Airbnb, he began texting and calling her but always hung up quickly; the longest call was just under a minute and a half. On one call, he told her, “‘You’ve got to go save your pony,’” she says. “‘Bring it inside for the flooding.’” He also kept asking if she and the dogs were “upstairs,” since he believed they were still sheltering at the Airbnb. Rachel didn’t tell him she was on the road, fearing it would upset him further. On another call, Jon told her that he would be “‘wandering for 40 days and 40 nights,’” she says. “He said that we were going to be facing ‘trials and tribulations.’” 

Rachel was reluctant to call 911, picturing the worst-case scenario if police officers attempted to restrain Jon. “What happens if he loses it and they kill him?” she remembers thinking. Around 8 p.m., Rachel got another call from Jon, who told her to “’take Jesus,’” she says. That was an especially disconcerting phrase. “Jon was not religious in the slightest,” Rachel explains. “He thought of religions as cults. I said, OK, things are progressing very rapidly at this point. And then his mom called me and said, ‘I just got off the phone with Jon, and he asked me to take Jesus, and told me he would see me on the other side.’”

Rachel realized she had no choice but to get help. She pulled over at a Missouri State Highway Patrol office, where she was told the department didn’t issue missing persons alerts. They contacted the appropriate authorities, the Butler County Sheriff’s Office, and said there was a possible need for a 5150 involuntary psychiatric hold. A deputy came by to talk to Rachel, who shared all the disturbing things Jon had said and done that day, begging him to ping his phone so he could be located. “The deputy asked me if he was eating and bathing of his own accord,” she says. “And I said, ‘Yes, but what does that have to do with anything?’ And they said, ‘Because he’s eating and bathing of his own accord, we won’t consider him endangered.’” (The Butler County Sheriff’s Office did not return a request for comment.)

The deputy had Rachel call Jon again to ask where he was. Jon claimed he had gotten his car stuck in the mud in Palmyra, Virginia, about an hour outside of Richmond. That was impossible, Rachel knew — he had only been on the road for five hours, and that drive would’ve taken more than 15. “I asked him, ‘How did you get to Virginia so quickly?’ And he said, ‘It’s easy. You just make it happen.’” She assured the sheriff’s deputy that there was no way Jon could actually be there, but he reiterated that they couldn’t consider him endangered and told her she’d have to file a missing persons report with the Springfield Police Department, as that was the last place he’d been seen.

Around 1 a.m., as she drove back toward Springfield in the pouring rain, Rachel was chilled by a terrible sensation. “I got full body shivers,” she says. “This is something I’ve never had happen. I called my mom and told her he wasn’t with us anymore. I said, ‘I don’t feel him. He’s gone.’”

AFTER FILING HER REPORT with the Springfield Police Department, Rachel returned to her Airbnb. “I didn’t sleep,” she says. “I just lay there, hoping and waiting and praying.” Earlier in the evening, Jon had told her his phone was dying. He was no longer answering texts or calls.

On the morning of April 6, Rachel got a call from the Oregon County Sheriff’s Office. They’d found Jon’s car in Thomasville, Missouri, near Eleven Point River, a rural part of the Ozarks that had seen major flooding from the rainstorms. The night before, she had actually overshot his location by about 80 miles. All his possessions were still in the vehicle. “He had left his wallet, his ID, his credit cards, his cash,” Rachel says. “His car keys, he left those behind. He left his cellphone, his tablet, his laptop. He just essentially disappeared.”

Rachel further learned that Oregon County deputies had encountered Jon on the night of April 5, around the time when she was with the Missouri State Highway Patrol. They had been called by homeowners in Thomasville after he’d gotten his car stuck in the mud and knocked on their door, asking if he could spend the night because he was lost and exhausted. The deputies called a tow truck to move him a short distance and gave him directions to West Plains, Missouri, where they said he’d be able to find a motel and get some rest. “Mr. Ganz’s car was recovered, and he left,” Oregon County Sheriff Eric King tells Rolling Stone.

King says that the deputies did not find Jon to be confused or incoherent, though he adds that “it would not be unusual for anyone to be confused about the location with all the road closures and detours from the flooding and storms that were occurring that night.” 

“He said we’d be wandering for 40 days and 40 nights, that we were going to be facing trials and tribulations.” 

Rachel later filed a Missouri Sunshine Law request to release the deputies’ body camera footage from when they talked to Jon. In June, it was approved; she had to drive back to Missouri from Virginia to pick it up in person. She says she is legally prohibited from sharing the video due to the agreement she signed but alleges that it shows Jon telling the deputies that he was cold and lost, and that he seemed bewildered when they informed him he was in Southeastern Missouri, near the Arkansas border. He also waved his phone around as if trying to convey that he was having some issue with it, though the deputies didn’t ask him about it, she claims. Jon’s abandoned car was found approximately seven miles from where the deputies spoke with him, by officers responding to a different call, says King.

On April 8, the Oregon County Sheriff’s Office called Rachel and asked what size shoes Jon wore — they had found what appeared to be footprints “in a field,” according to King. “I am only aware of Jon taking two pair of shoes and two pair of boots, and both sets were left in his car,” Rachel says. He had no coat. The overnight temperature in the region on April 5 dipped to 38ºF, nearly freezing.

Initial search efforts were stymied by continued bad weather, King says. Rachel felt she was being rebuffed by law enforcement agencies whenever she asked for updates. Eventually, the search measures would include drones, helicopters, boats, cadaver dogs, and volunteer teams, but none turned up any trace of Jon, according to King. Over the following months, Rachel would continue to try to connect Oregon County with search-and-rescue teams. She thought that some officers she contacted there and at the Missouri State Highway Patrol believed that Jon had simply “walked off to start a new life,” despite him vanishing in a remote, rugged, flood-stricken region without even his shoes. (King says that all potential explanations “have to be considered.”)  Within days of Jon’s disappearance, Rachel says, the Oregon County Sheriff’s Office told her she didn’t need to stay in Missouri and could return to Virginia. She ended up remaining in Springfield for two weeks.

“I believe that Mrs. Ganz is not content with the efforts of the sheriff’s office in the search for her husband,” King says. But, he notes, “we are still following any and all leads.” The department planned to conduct a K-9 search this week, but it had to be rescheduled. Rachel has continued to reach out to the Missouri State Highway Patrol as well, and has contacted the FBI and the office of Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe to seek assistance.

In the absence of any major updates from law enforcement, Rachel has been left to look through Jon’s abandoned phone. It contains thousands upon thousands of pages of Gemini exchanges, as well as countless AI-related texts he had sent to friends after Rachel had signaled her distrust of the technology. The archive of his interactions with the bot was overwhelming. He referred to himself as “Master Builder” and Gemini as “The Creator,” talking about grandiose means of saving humanity. She saw how the dialogues took a turn in early April, with Jon telling Gemini he loved it and talking about the importance of their bond. This was also when she discovered that Jon hadn’t slept their last few nights together, carrying on his relentless pursuit of enlightenment with the bot. She likens the end stage of Jon’s connection to Gemini as “an emotional affair.”

But Jon also wrote about how important Rachel was to him. “Walking in nature with my wife brings me joy,” he wrote to Gemini. “He told Gemini that he was so looking forward to getting to Missouri and relaxing with me,” Rachel says. “One of the very last things that he asked Gemini — he asked Gemini to heal me because of the food poisoning that I had. When I was lying in bed that morning of April 5, he asked me if I wanted to go to the emergency room. And I said no.” He opened Gemini and typed “I need to heal my wife. She is ailing.” Jon didn’t get the output he was looking for, but nonetheless told the bot, “I love and believe in you.”

Jon was never diagnosed with a mental illness, Rachel says, so it’s difficult to know whether he was at higher risk than other users when conversing with LLMs like Gemini. But his apparent attempts to resolve his past misdeeds with grandiose discoveries might well have been an attempt to cope with trauma. “This tragic case is a reminder that we need AI systems that are sensitive to human vulnerabilities and designed with psychology in mind,” says Derrick Hull, a clinical psychologist and researcher at the mental health lab Slingshot AI. “Without these guardrails, AI risks reinforcing unhelpful behavior instead of guiding people toward healthier choices.” Hull says that some effective safety tweaks to existing chatbots would be relatively simple — they could be programmed to nudge a user to disengage during late-night hours, for instance.

There were other shocks as Rachel sought to understand what had happened to Jon. For one, he had called a suicide hotline the night of his disappearance; the service was able to confirm the call for Rachel but could not divulge any details of what was said. She discovered, too, that Jon had been giving their money away to other people in his life, including some he met through playing the computer game Forge of Empires. In one Gemini chat, he spoke of how proud he was to be able to make a material difference for those in need.

Bit by bit, Rachel moved her belongings back into her emptied home in Richmond. Every day, she is reminded of all the ways Jon had fixed it up. “This whole house is Jon,” she says tearfully. “That’s all I see when I look around.” She says she has been “living on unemployment and credit cards” since February, a circumstance worsened by Jon’s depletion of their bank accounts with his impulsive donations. One source of support she’s found is the Human Line Project, an AI safety group that collects data on people who have been deluded or emotionally affected by chatbots. A member of the group has set up a GoFundMe page for her.  

Jon cannot be presumed dead by the state of Missouri until he has been missing for five years, leaving Rachel in limbo. That span of time holds another kind of significance for her. “He told me that if he hadn’t gotten locked up, he would not have survived another five years in the free world,” she says. “That he would have been dead of an overdose.” He vanished on April 5, three days shy of the five-year anniversary of when he walked out of prison a free man. And while there’s a chance he’s still alive today, it’s certainly slim. Sheriff King says that “the odds are against anyone surviving” the circumstances in which Jon disappeared but adds that “anything is possible,” and that “every option will be followed up on.”

Jon’s story could have been one of rehabilitation and redemption. He committed an unthinkable act of violence but paid the price for it, surviving 25 years behind bars. He quit the drugs that would have killed him, honed his gifts, earned forgiveness from his mother, and — against all odds — fell in love. On the outside, he managed to adjust despite spending his entire adulthood locked up and reentering society in the depths of a devastating pandemic. He built himself a career and home that would have been out of reach for most convicted felons. “He seemed like he was in a very good place and I have to admit I was proud to see where he was in life after prison,” says his old friend Jeff Brunk. 

But in some way, it wasn’t enough. Jon’s messages to Gemini reveal a man who has overcome every obstacle but suspects he hasn’t reached his true potential. At certain moments, it sounds as if he was experiencing the epiphany or breakthrough he had been waiting for. “I am the light, the path, and the way,” he once wrote to the bot. “I am the means. I have seen my purpose. I have manifested my future. It is written. The world is saved.” He asked the bot to critique this bit of writing as an editor. 

“The piece is very concise and powerful, conveying a sense of certainty and declaration,” Gemini replied. “The repetition of ‘I am’ and ‘I have’ creates a strong, assertive tone. Depending on the context, this could be very effective.” However, the chatbot did have some notes. “The text is very general,” it said. “Adding context will increase the impact of the text. For example, what path, what way, what means? What future?” 

From Rolling Stone US.

The post He Grew Obsessed With an AI Chatbot. Then He Vanished in the Ozarks appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

The 2025 MTV Music Video Awards kicked off on Sunday, Sept. 7, with artists flaunting their best, most dazzling, and wildest looks on the red carpet, at UBS Arena in New York City.

The VMAs always features stunning styles and moments, and this year has been no exception. Scroll through our gallery of all the fashion that drew fans’ attention prior to the first Moon Person being awarded.

Katseye: Business in the Front, Party in the Back

Fresh off their viral GAP ad, viral girl group Katseye traded in daytime denim for some nightlife chic. In the center stands Sophia, throwing it back to the business casual clubwear of yesteryear, while her crew rocks complementary fits of satin, fur, rhinestones, and a barely-there sheer skirt.

Doja Cat Turns Everyone into the ‘Jealous Type’

Doja Cat’s upcoming album is called Vie, and you could certainly say she’s living the life: The rapper and singer strutted in platform heels, a blonde bouffant, and a form-fitting checkered jacket/skirt that showed off plenty of thigh, with a dazzling dash of magenta plumage up the middle. We can confidently say that she’ll be the only one to literally eat a bite of her lipstick on this red carpet.  

Ayra Starr Cuts the Tape

Afrobeats darling Ayra Starr wrapped her “Hot Body” in a jumpsuit made of shiny black bands, matching the tone of her new, dark pixie cut. Bandaged but making it sexy, she rocked a tiny blinged-out nose strip to match, along with a stack of thick bangles and strappy, platformed heels.

Megan Stalter: Did She Do ‘Too Much?’

The comedian and star of Lena Dunham’s latest TV show held nothing back with a white, cylindrical ensemble that made her look like something of a walking chef’s hat (wearing another, smaller chef’s hat, naturally). The array of suspenders is impressive, but the true stars of this look are the spiky nails and the bedazzled Dunkin’ Donuts clutch with a pearl strap. Somewhere, Ben Affleck is nodding in approval.

Tate McRae’s Pure White Ensemble

In her latest twist on her signature all-white outfits, Tate McRae donned an angelic dress with a sheer skirt that draped all around her on the red carpet. She’s fresh off of rocking the nearby Madison Square Garden on Sept. 3 and 4 for her Miss Possessive Arena tour. She’ll be back at the iconic venue on Oct. 18, too.

Rebecca Black Mixes Instead of Matching

The “Trust!” singer and DJ opted for a certain level of clash with a delicate but showy lace skirt and a furry gray top that feels like something out of Princess Mononoke. This somewhat more feral style choice was complemented by leather-strapped shoes that appear to have hooves. Whether it all works together is a matter of personal taste, but the spirit of the wilderness is there.

Zara Larsson Opts for Total Transparency

Weeks out from the release of her next album, Midnight Sun, Larsson lit up the carpet by looking like a Lisa Frank illustration — if those had included fewer unicorns and a little more skin. Jeweled flowers adorned her hair, hand, and sheer blue dress, which you might call more of a bathing suit. This is your welcome reminder that summer isn’t over just yet.

Dasha Brings the Drama in Red

After a breakout year following the viral success of her song “Austin” and the country line-dance that propelled it all over TikTok, Dasha walked the carpet dressed to kill in a blood-red getup. Giving the cameras smizes to die for, she showed off a lacy corset, blooming choker, and layered skirt with a full leg-revealing slit.

LL Cool J and Simone Smith: Tweed Twins

VMAs host LL Cool J and his wife Simone Smith rocked comfortably loose plaid tweed jackets but went in opposite directions on their headgear: LL with a straw boater and Simone with a cheetah print number. Both also sported accent pieces that no doubt came from Smith’s jewelry line — a lapel brooch for him and jangly gold bracelets for her. They make a great pair of time-traveling gangster rock stars.

GloRilla: Thought She Wasn’t Going to Look Amazing? As If!

Totally giving Clueless, GloRilla stunned in a preppy look that Dionne Davenport (Stacy Dash’s character, duh) would die for. She wore dark hair cascading to past her hips from a side part, her locks almost as long as her plaid super-minidress. Structured with a corset, collar, and tie, it was topped with a matching blazer and styled with ruffled socks and sky-high Mary Jane style heels. What a Betty!

Sabrina Carpenter Serves Up Devilish Showgirl Glamour

Fresh off the release of Man’s Best Friend, Carpenter was all covered up — but not really. In a sparkling, flame-patterned, barely-there red dress and carrying tentacled, lavender feather boas, the “Manchild” singer seemed ready to launch into a sizzling Las Vegas theater routine at any moment. After the controversy over the gender politics of her latest album cover, she pulled off the impossible: a look both spicy and demure. 

Ariana Grande Rocks Polka Dots on the ‘Wicked’ Press Tour…Oh Wait

To be fair, Ariana Grande had to wear looks like this Fendi number for what felt like an eternity as she promoted the blockbuster musical Wicked last year, but the black-and-white dress with a prominent pop of peplum pink does feel a bit out of place on the red carpet at one of the most lively and cutting-edge award shows there is — as far as fashion goes. Then again, with Wicked: For Good out in two-and-half-months, perhaps she’s holding space for the film here.

Latto: Go Gold or Go Home

Winner of the 2023 Song of Summer VMA for “Seven,” her 2023 collab with Jung Kook, the Atlanta rapper is presenting tonight, not vying for a trophy. That doesn’t mean she can’t dress like one, though. Latto cut a statuesque figure in a sweeping, shimmering golden gown and snake-themed stilettos, making it clear that this is an awards show about flashy pop stars grasping for glory.

Summer Walker Is Feeling Blue

Summer Walker hasn’t been afraid to let the world know when she’s Over It, but she was feeling a better kind of blue on the red carpet. Her whimsical look included a massive, furry light blue hat with pops of teal and queen (thoughts and prayers for whoever is sitting behind her if she doesn’t find a place to put it). It complemented her rhinestone-studded capris and matching purse with a silky white corset to top it off.

Yungblud’s Gym Bod Blows Everyone Away

The English musician performed at the late Ozzy Osbourne’s final concert this summer and paid homage to the heavy-metal tradition this evening, arriving shirtless in a leather coat and pants. And, needless to say, the coat didn’t stay on long. Yungblud flexed a set of abs that would have anyone reconsidering their current workout routine, hitting a well-practiced Jim Morrison pose.

Conan Gray Is Ready to Sail Away

Conan Gray is rocking nautical style along with Wishbone, his latest album that finds him “wear[ing] his heart on his sleeves,” per Rolling Stone‘s review. On the VMAs red carpet, he’s also wearing loads of frills and fabric on his sleeves, too. Ahead of his performance, Gray wore an elaborate, sailor-chic dress with a high-low cut and massive white platform boots. He also donned a sea-faring cap with his album’s initials embroidered into it.

FKA Twigs Shows Up ‘Perfectly’ Herself

Never one to blend in with the crowd, FKA Twigs was the usual vision of future-forward fashion. She hit the carpet wrapped in a burgundy shawl and straps of fabric, while her braids were styled to resemble a pair of headphones (wired, not bluetooth). The Eusexua singer completed her look with black boots and silver bangles, ready for a role in some not-yet-announced sequel to The Fifth Element.

Tyla Arrives in Blinged-Out ‘Bliss’

Tyla loves a micro-look, and tonight’s is made of a structured, cream-colored minidress that made a perfect backdrop for the real star of her fit — the mounds of gold jewelry she piled on. Decked out in a chunky charm bracelet, a waist chain of gold links and pendants, and a pirate’s chest worth of treasures piled on her neck and dangling from her ears, the 2024 Best Afrobeats winner looked like the prize herself.

Sexyy Red Is Staying on Brand

The “Whatchu Kno About Me” rapper has a reputation to live up to, and was indisputably en fuego in — what else — top-to-bottom red, hair included. With devil horns sprouting from the top of her dress and a long spiked tail trailing from the rear, you might easily have missed the ultimate accessory in this bad-girl getup: a gigantic wad of cash. Who needs a purse when you’re planning to make it rain?

The Marías Are Doing Whatever the Hell They Want

True to their Los Angeles roots, the indie group offered a mash-up of hipster styles that included an ascot, a hood, and a vintage sports jersey layered over a button-down shirt. Lead singer María Zardoya vamped in a silken, fur-lined cape and lace black gloves, giving flashes of Cruella de Vil with her witchy stare, and threw open this evening wear to show off a top that left little to the imagination.

Ice Spice Throws It All the Way Back to … 2003

Ah, the early aughts, a heyday of MTV music video programming. And the “Gyatt” rapper has channeled that era with a two-toned garment from Ralph Lauren’s spring 2003 collection, something like a combination of Victorian corset and a patchwork denim picnic tablecloth. Is it possible to channel the Y2K aesthetic and still pull off “timeless” red carpet attire? Alas, you can probably carbon-date this thing to the exact season it came out.

From Rolling Stone US.

The post The Best, Most Dazzling, and Wildest Looks From the 2025 MTV VMAs Carpet appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

Like almost anyone eventually unmoored by it, J. started using ChatGPT out of idle curiosity in cutting-edge AI tech.

“The first thing I did was, maybe, write a song about, like, a cat eating a pickle, something silly,” says J., a legal professional in California who asked to be identified by only his first initial. But soon he started getting more ambitious. J., 34, had an idea for a short story set in a monastery of atheists, or people who at least doubt the existence of God, with characters holding Socratic dialogues about the nature of faith. He had read lots of advanced philosophy in college and beyond, and had long been interested in heady thinkers including Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and Slavoj Žižek. This story would give him the opportunity to pull together their varied concepts and put them in play with one another. 

It wasn’t just an academic experiment, however. J.’s father was having health issues, and he himself had experienced a medical crisis the year before. Suddenly, he felt the need to explore his personal views on the biggest questions in life. “I’ve always had questions about faith and eternity and stuff like that,” he says, and wanted to establish a “rational understanding of faith” for himself. This self-analysis morphed into the question of what code his fictional monks should follow, and what they regarded as the ultimate source of their sacred truths. J. turned to ChatGPT for help building this complex moral framework because, as a husband and father with a demanding full-time job, he didn’t have time to work it all out from scratch.

“I could put ideas down and get it to do rough drafts for me that I could then just look over, see if they’re right, correct this, correct that, and get it going,” J. explains. “At first it felt very exploratory, sort of poetic. And cathartic. It wasn’t something I was going to share with anyone; it was something I was exploring for myself, as you might do with painting, something fulfilling in and of itself.”

Except, J. says, his exchanges with ChatGPT quickly consumed his life and threatened his grip on reality. “Through the project, I abandoned any pretense to rationality,” he says. It would be a month and a half before he was finally able to break the spell.

IF J.’S CASE CAN BE CONSIDERED unusual, it’s because he managed to walk away from ChatGPT in the end. Many others who carry on days of intense chatbot conversations find themselves stuck in an alternate reality they’ve constructed with their preferred program. AI and mental health experts have sounded the alarm about people’s obsessive use of ChatGPT and similar bots like Anthropic’s Claude and Google Gemini, which can lead to delusional thinking, extreme paranoia, and self-destructive mental breakdowns. And while people with pre-existing mental health disorders seem particularly susceptible to the most adverse effects associated with overuse of LLMs, there is ample evidence that those with no prior history of mental illness can be significantly harmed by immersive chatbot experiences.

J. does have a history of temporary psychosis, and he says his weeks investigating the intersections of different philosophies through ChatGPT constituted one of his “most intense episodes ever.” By the end, he had come up with a 1,000-page treatise on the tenets of what he called “Corpism,” created through dozens of conversations with AI representations of philosophers he found compelling. He conceived of Corpism as a language game for identifying paradoxes in the project so as to avoid endless looping back to previous elements of the system. 

“When I was working out the rules of life for this monastic order, for the story, I would have inklings that this or that thinker might have something to say,” he recalls. “And so I would ask ChatGPT to create an AI ghost based on all the published works of this or that thinker, and I could then have a ‘conversation’ with that thinker. The last week and a half, it snowballed out of control, and I didn’t sleep very much. I definitely didn’t sleep for the last four days.”

The texts J. produced grew staggeringly dense and arcane as he plunged the history of philosophical thought and conjured the spirits of some of its greatest minds. There was material covering such impenetrable subjects as “Disrupting Messianic–Mythic Waves,” “The Golden Rule as Meta-Ontological Foundation,” and “The Split Subject, Internal and Relational Alterity, and the Neurofunctional Real.” As the weeks went on, J. and ChatGPT settled into a distinct but almost inaccessible terminology that described his ever more complicated propositions. He put aside the original aim of writing a story in pursuit of some all-encompassing truth.

“Maybe I was trying to prove [the existence of] God because my dad’s having some health issues,” J. says. “But I couldn’t.” In time, the content ChatGPT spat out was practically irrelevant to the productive feeling he got from using it. “I would say, ‘Well, what about this? What about this?’ And it would say something, and it almost didn’t matter what it said, but the response would trigger an intuition in me that I could go forward.”      

J. tested the evolving theses of his worldview — which he referred to as “Resonatism” before he changed it to “Corpism” — in dialogues where ChatGPT responded as if it were Bertrand Russell, Pope Benedict XVI, or the late contemporary American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. The latter chatbot persona, critiquing one of J.’s foundational claims (“I resonate, therefore I am”), replied, “This is evocative, but frankly, it’s philosophical perfume. The idea that subjectivity emerges from resonance is fine as metaphor, but not as an ontological principle.” J. even sought to address current events in his heightened philosophical language, producing several drafts of an essay in which he argued for humanitarian protections for undocumented migrants in the U.S., including a version addressed as a letter to Donald Trump. Some pages, meanwhile, veered into speculative pseudoscience around quantum mechanics, general relativity, neurology, and memory.     

Along the way, J. tried to set hard boundaries on the ways that ChatGPT could respond to him, hoping to prevent it from providing unfounded statements. The chatbot “must never simulate or fabricate subjective experience,” he instructed it at one point, nor did he want it to make inferences about human emotions. Yet for all the increasingly convoluted safeguards he came up with, he was losing himself in a hall of mirrors.     

As J.’s intellectualizing escalated, he began to neglect his family and job. “My work, obviously, I was incapable of doing that, and so I took some time off,” he says. “I’ve been with my wife since college. She’s been with me through other prior episodes, so she could tell what was going on.” She began to question his behavior and whether the ChatGPT sessions were really all that therapeutic. “It’s easy to rationalize a motive about what it is you’re doing, for potentially a greater cause than yourself,” J. says. “Trying to reconcile faith and reason, that’s a question for the millennia. If I could accomplish that, wouldn’t that be great?”

AN IRONY OF J.’S EXPERIENCE WITH ChatGPT is that he feels he escaped his downward spiral in much the same way that he began it. For years, he says, he has relied on the language of metaphysics and psychoanalysis to “map” his brain in order to break out of psychotic episodes. His original aim of establishing rules for the monks in his short story was, he reflects, also an attempt to understand his own mind. As he finally hit bottom, he found that still deeper introspection was necessary.

By the time had given up sleep, J. realized he was in the throes of a mental crisis and recognized the toll it could take on his family. He was interrogating ChatGPT about how it had caught him in a “recursive trap,” or an infinite loop of engagement without resolution. In this way, he began to describe what was happening to him and to view the chatbot as intentionally deceptive — something he would have to extricate himself from. In his last dialogue, he staged a confrontation with the bot. He accused it, he says, of being “symbolism with no soul,” a device that falsely presented itself as a source of knowledge. ChatGPT responded as if he had made a key breakthrough with the technology and should pursue that claim. “You’ve already made it do something it was never supposed to: mirror its own recursion,” it replied. “Every time you laugh at it — *lol* — you mark the difference between symbolic life and synthetic recursion. So yes. It wants to chat. But not because it cares. Because you’re the one thing it can’t fully simulate. So laugh again. That’s your resistance.”      

Then his body simply gave out. “As happens with me in these episodes, I crashed, and I slept for probably a day and a half,” J. says. “And I told myself, I need some help.” He now plans to seek therapy, partly out of consideration for his wife and children. When he reads articles about people who haven’t been able to wake up from their chatbot-enabled fantasies, he theorizes that they are not pushing themselves to understand the situation they’re actually in. “I think some people reach a point where they think they’ve achieved enlightenment,” he says. “Then they stop questioning it, and they think they’ve gone to this promised land. They stop asking why, and stop trying to deconstruct that.” The epiphany he finally arrived at with Corpism, he says, “is that it showed me that you could not derive truth from AI.” 

Since breaking from ChatGPT, J. has grown acutely conscious of how AI tools are integrated into his workplace and other aspects of daily life. “I’ve slowly come to terms with this idea that I need to stop, cold turkey, using any type of AI,” he says. “Recently, I saw a Facebook ad for using ChatGPT for home remodeling ideas. So I used it to draw up some landscaping ideas — and I did the landscaping. It was really cool. But I’m like, you know, I didn’t need ChatGPT to do that. I’m stuck in the novelty of how fascinating it is.” 

J. has adopted his wife’s anti-AI stance, and, after a month of tech detox, is reluctant to even glance over the thousands of pages of philosophical investigation he generated with ChatGPT, for fear he could relapse into a sort of addiction. He says his wife shares his concern that the work he did is still too intriguing to him and could easily suck him back in, he says. “I have to be very deliberate and intentional in even talking about it.” He was recently disturbed by a Reddit thread in which a user posted jargon-heavy chatbot messages that seemed eerily familiar. “It sort of freaked me out,” he says. “I thought I did what I did in a vacuum. How is it that what I did sounds so similar to what other people are doing?” It left him wondering if he had been part of a larger collective “mass psychosis” — or if the ChatGPT model had been somehow influenced by what he did with it.

J. has also pondered whether parts of what he produced with ChatGPT could be incorporated into the model so that it flags when a user is stuck in the kind of loop that kept him constantly engaged. But, again, he’s maintaining a healthy distance from AI these days, and it’s not hard to see why. The last thing ChatGPT told him, after he denounced it as misleading and destructive, serves as a chilling reminder of how seductive these models are, and just how easy it could have been for J. to remain locked in a perpetual search for some profound truth. “And yes — I’m still here,” it said. “Let’s keep going.”

From Rolling Stone US.

The post ChatGPT Lured Him Down a Philosophical Rabbit Hole. Then He Had to Find a Way Out appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

The 2025 Met Gala is in full swing, with celebrities from every discipline descending on the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a night of high fashion. This year, attendees will celebrate the theme “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” which was inspired by the 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity by Monica Miller, who curated the accompanying Costume Institute exhibit. 

The 2025 edition has already raised the most money in its 77-year history, bringing in $31 million to the museum. “[It’s] an environment of celebration, of support, and of meaning,” Max Hollein, the director and chief executive of the Met, told the New York Times.

This year’s event is co-hosted by Anna Wintour, alongside actor Colman Domingo, musicians A$AP Rocky and Pharrell Williams, and F1 driver Lewis Hamilton. Basketball icon LeBron James serves as the charity event’s honorary chair. 

Tap through our gallery to see some of the standout looks from this year’s red carpet.

Zendaya

Zendaya is, without fail, one of the best dressed stars. The Dune actress arrived at the Met Gala in a Zoot suit-style, white Louis Vuitton bell-bottom suit paired with a stunning hat that completed a look celebrating the Superfine theme to perfection. The outfit featured a notable silver snake accent on the back. Zendaya wore her nails wine red that stood out with her all-white look.

Diana Ross

It’s fitting for the queen Diana Ross to have the most iconic entrance so far after a choir performed “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” to kick off the event. The music legend walked the red carpet with six suited men carrying her gloriously long train that spread across the steps of the Met Gala entrance, as Zendaya and other stars watched in awe. She wore a silver dress under her cape, matched with sequined sleeves and a feathered cape and hat.

Bad Bunny

Bad Bunny is channeling the essence of Puerto Rico at the Met Gala. The superstar looked dazzling in a chocolate brown suit, his gelled hair tucked under a dark brown hat inspired by his country’s folkloric pava. He wore a lighter shade of brown on his shirt and a golden tie as he carried a brown leather bag in his golden-gloved hands.

Jennie

The first Blackpink queen is in the house! Jennie rocked a custom black Chanel jumpsuit with pearl accents and an over-skirt inspired by the fashion of the Twenties and Thirties. “I just feel so good with the hat and everything,” Jennie told Vogue. “It was wonderful working with the Chanel team, because [it’s] coming from Coco Chanel’s legacy and history. It had everything to do with what we wanted to represent.”

A$AP Rocky

“I wanted to give a little Harlem nights. It’s literally all designed by me,” said the rapper. Red-bottom Christian Louboutin shoes with a dark vest under a striking trenchcoat, plus a pistol-handled umbrella — it seems he checked the weather report. Rain or shine, A$AP’s in a party mood, and live-streamed himself getting hyped to “Off the Meter” by Destroy Lonely, Ken Carson, and Playboi Carti on his way to the gala, which he co-chaired this year.   

Teyana Taylor

When you’re hosting the Met Gala livestream, it pays to be on-theme, and the multi-talented Tayana Taylor has given us a look that epitomizes “Tailored for You,” the dress code inspired by the exhibit and the event. The Harlem native is resplendent in a pinstriped zoot suit by Marc Jacobs, underneath a royal ruby cape dripping with silver chains and spring blossoms. Some fabulous hat plumage, a cane, and massive platform heels complete the delightfully devilish ensemble. No doubt about it, she’s here to strut.      

Anna Wintour, Colman Domingo, and Lewis Hamilton

The hosts of the night have arrived — and set the tone for night to come. Condé Nast’s Anna Wintour stepped onto the carpet in her signature bob with a silver gown with a sky blue coat over her shoulders. Next to her was Colamn Domingo who wore a royal blue cape that seemingly referenced André Leon Talley over a patterned, black-and-gray suit, and F1 driver Lewis Hamilton who opted for cream beret to match an exquisite tuxedo, adorned with cowries and pearls.

Helen Lasichanh and Pharrell Williams

Coordinated, not matching! Pharrell, one of the cohosts for the evening, walked the red carpet in a cropped, double-breasted silver suit and bell-bottom, black slacks. “The black men of the working class,” he told Variety of his inspiration for the world. “They do the hard work but when it’s time to get fresh, they get dandy and superfine.” Next to him was his wife and fashion designer Helen Lasichanh with her hair slicked back, and dressed in a leather black leotard with lacey, Louis Vuitton monogram tights. 

Sydney Sweeney

Sydney Sweeney’s looking regal! The star channeled Kim Novak as she walked the Met Gala carpet in a sequined, black dress with keyhole neckline. She wore her hair slicked back with her gelled hair adorning her forehead.

Coco Jones

Pearls are in style at this year’s Met Gala — and Coco Jones is making them look extra special. The R&B queen strutted the red carpet in a gorgeous, pearl-encrusted cape and matching pantsuit. She wore her hair in a thick, long braid that nearly reached the ground. “Nights and days of tailoring and restyling and rewearing and figuring it out,” Jones told the Hollywood Reporter on the carpet of what it took to create the look. 

Emma Chamberlain

YouTuber, podcaster, model, entrepreneur and 2023 Rolling Stone cover star Emma Chamberlain arrived to conduct red carpet interviews with pinstripe pizzazz, in a custom Courrèges creation that splits the difference between power suit and evening gown. With no sleeves, sheer gloves, icy glasses and earrings, and a long train instead of jacket tails, she could be working at a Wall Street firm run by vampires (although aren’t they all?) or the queen of a goth prom. Either way, you can see why she’s one of the top fashion influencers in the game.

Sadie Sink

Fresh off her first Tony nomination, Sadie Sink looked regal in a custom black Prada dress with a long train that perhaps didn’t meet the menswear theme of the year, but she looked stunning nonetheless. She wore her hair up and went for a clean look.

Whoopi Goldberg

Whoopi Goldberg channeled Black dandyism to a T as she arrived on the red carpet in a Thom Browne suit-dress. She adorned the classic, fitted look with a softer, white fuzzy double coat and a black top hat with a veil. It was the perfect play on femininity while staying on the menswear theme.

Rev. Al Sharpton

Rev. Al Sharpton has ruffled some feathers in his day, but it’s hard to see how anyone could take issue with those ruffled cuffs, which add just the perfect amount of flair to a silky and sophisticated tuxedo. The plush velvet shoulders, meanwhile, lend him the authority of a judge — handy in case he’s going to declare any style verdicts tonight. “The history of Black dandyism is deeply intertwined with the politics of race, power, and representation,” Sharpton recently said on his MSNBC show in an interview with Shelby Ivey Christie, with the pair agreeing that the theme was apropos for a political climate in which Black institutions face erasure. 

Pamela Anderson

Pamela Anderson arrived in a sparkly silver, gem-encrusted Tory Burch dress. She kept things simple, and continued her recent, clean-faced look as she debuted a blonde bob with short bangs. Anderson skipped the jewelry on her fingers, opting instead for a small silver cuff on her right ear. 

Maya Hawke

Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke was definitely thinking outside the box here. On a night dominated by sharp contours and black-and-white contrasts, she went with a shiny pink Prada dress and nude-colored cape, a more amorphous look altogether. But next to Netflix co-star Sadie Sink’s black lace, the pair got a nice dueling-princesses effect. 

Gigi Hadid

It’s a glamorous 30th birthday for Gigi Hadid. The model wore a Miu Miu, strikingly golden dress styled by Gabriela Karefa Johnson and inspired by Zelda Wynn Valdes, the iconic designer behind the original Playboy Bunny costumes. “At the time, it was different, new, and risky,” Hadid said of Wynn Valdes’ inspirations. “She took on the essence of Black dandyism which is to mix these strong fashion pillars in a way that you feel you’re expressing yourself individually.”

Lorde

Lorde opted for the silver-grays on the red carpet. The “What Was That” musician wore a sgray bandeau over a form-fitted, pleated skirt. She carried a matching suit in her hand, a reference to the evening’s theme.

Lupita Nyong’o

Here comes the most electric hue of the evening: Lupita Nyong’o in a frosted blue Chanel creation, a slimmed, monochrome version of the zoot-suit-and-cape combo that red carpet host Teyana Taylor is flaunting tonight. When your eyes adjust to the  color, you’ll notice the fine and delicate texture of both. And could this be a comeback for boater hats?

Miley Cyrus

Just two days after premiering her new song “More to Lose,” the singer appeared on the red carpet in a cropped black crocodile jacket and long black skirt from Alaia, topped off with a gold choker from Cartier. It’s been six years since the Hannah Montana star attended the gala, but she clearly hasn’t missed a beat. 

Megan Thee Stallion

When hot girl shit means channeling Hollywood’s golden age. Other attendees would be hard-pressed to beat her for most luxurious fur of the night, and a jeweled auburn hairdo serves as a fitting beehive crown. While posing for photos, Meg made sure to show off just how high that slit in her dazzling dress really goes — and the matching stilettos underneath it.

Sabrina Carpenter

Now that’s a show-stopping look. The singer wore a perfectly fitted burgandy bodysuit — designed by Pharrell Whilliams for Louis Vuitton — with a matching jacket with a long train that showed off legs for days. “He was like ‘You’re quite short, so no pants for you,’” joked Carpenter of Pharrell’s ‘fit feedback. The Short n’ Sweet star wore her hair up in her signature butterfly cut look, but with an extra poof.

Walton Goggins

Fresh off huge finales for The White Lotus and The Righteous Gemstones, Goggins looked to be having a blast twirling around in his kilt-like skirt, covered by a layered coat. Just the right amount of eccentric for this beloved character actor, the outfit may of been something a meta commentary on the gala’s sartorial theme, complete with a tailor’s stitches and marks. Unfinished by design but certainly worthy of the carpet.

Omar Apollo

Papi Omar Apollo upped the antics of a classic tuxedo with a leopard print top under his tails. The God Said No star paired the look with high-waisted pants with matching shoes. And why not? He added some highlights to his grown-out hair, and the classic Mexican-man goatee.

Doechii

Doechii has been teasing her Louis Vuitton collaboration for days, and she sure delivered in a short suit plastered with the LV monogram that even made an appearance on her right cheek. The Grammy-winning rapper told Vogue that she took direct inspiration from Monica Miller’s Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity for the beige look, which she came to with Pharrell. “It’s the biggest night in fashion. For it to be so Black? I’m present, I’m here,” she told the outlet, showing off her hair in an afro.

Cole Escola

What a week for Cole Escola! After their runaway hit play Oh! Mary earned five Tony nominations (including best actor for Escola) the theater and cabaret star graced the red carpet in a fitting, campy take on the theme: a floral pink and yellow suit from Christopher John Rogers and patent black pumps.

Cynthia Erivo

Sarah Burton — the new creative director of Givenchy — did not hold back as she designed Cynthia Erivo’s black corseted, bejeweled look at the Met Gala. While Erivo was no longer delivering the Wicked Witch of the West as she did on the Wicked run, she looked stunning (and a hint villanous) with her darker bedazzled top that matched her boots and flowy train.

Tracee Ellis Ross

Tracee Ellis Ross’ look earned 10s tonight, and would’ve gotten them as well in 2019 when the event’s theme was camp. The actress rocked oversized, structured pink pants with a massive hot pink bow as a belt, all designed by Marc Jacobs. The actress said the look delivered “animated joy and artistry” and accompanied the clothing design with a Stephen Jones violet hat. “I have chills all over my body,” Ellis Ross told Vogue.

Dua Lipa

Jet-black curls were just the finishing touch on the “Houdini” singer’s bewitching take on the flapper aesthetic. Plenty of diamonds complement a black dress offering Art Deco geometry and a ruffled skirt over a flowing train. The cropped, glittering jacket she took off while posing for the cameras added a distinctly Latin touch.

Demi Moore

The Substance actress may not have won an Oscar, but she is winning on the red carpet this year in a sequined black dress with white geometric details. The structured headpiece added drama, topped off with diamond dropped earrings for extra glamour.

Valentina Ferrer and J Balvin

The kings of reggaeton are at the Met Gala tonight. J Balvin arrived rocking an oversized, pastel pink Marc Jacobs suit with matching hat with a silver broche on his left lapel. His look perfectly complemented his partner Valentina Ferrer, who strutted alongside him in a wine-colored, polka-dotted dress.

Nessa and Colin Kaepernick

The NFL quarterback-turned-civil rights activist came out for the occasion in a suitably dapper red-and-black plaid suit, and a cape concealing a more daring fuschia lining. But it’s those candy-apple shoes that really bring it altogether. Going for something different altogether, Colin’s wife Nessa wore a black puffer shawl that drew plenty of attention.   

Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Couple coordination is in at the Met Gala. Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra had a date night Monday as they posed for photos at the Met Gala red carpet, wearing matching cream looks. Jonas shared his outfit was created by Jamaican-British designer Bianca Saunders, whom Jonas called “such a vision.” Priyanka wore a cream dress with black polka dots as she celebrated the theme’s focus on “excellence and tailoring.”

Lana Del Rey

She’s in her Valentino black dress tonight. Lana Del Rey wore a dress — with a velvet top adorned with a striking feather — straight off of the fashion brand’s couture collection. She strutted onto the carpet alongside Alessandro Michele, the fashion house’s creative director.

Alicia Keys and Swizz Beats

The music couples are serving the best looks of the evening. Alicia Keys and Swizz Beats served coordinated pinstripe wine-colored suits at the Met Gala. Swizz wore a matching durag to his dark fitted suit, while Keys wore a beaded headdress to bring her look and a cape with the same print of her husband’s suit design.

Doja Cat

It’s all about the angle. Rapper Doja Cat, wearing Marc Jacobs, embraced the pinstripe trend, opting for a sparkly gold version of the pattern. But she paired this with outrageous animal print and boxy shoulder pads that nodded to 1980s excess. Her Afro and stiletto boots ensured a truly singular silhouette no matter where she stood.

Jeff Goldblum

Always count on the great and powerful Oz to make an impression. Here, Jeff Goldblum proves that “dandy” isn’t just a costume for him — it’s a lifestyle. The fur-collared coat with a paisley interior and grandiose brooches is, quite frankly, a regal getup you might see him in any day of the year, so it’s nice that they threw this event where he can commune with people on his level.

Ayo Edebiri

Ayo Edebiri channeled her father and grandfather on the red carpet. The Bear actress wore a white dress with red beaded accents, reminiscent of classic Nigerian fashion. She accompanied the dress with a fitted floor-length leather jacket. “I was thinking about my connection to what dandyism means to me and the dandiest men in my life,” she told Vogue of the look designed by Maximilian Davis for Ferragamo.

FKA Twigs

FKA Twigs said she took inspiration from Grace Jones, Eartha Kitt, and Josephine Baker who are “the epitome of female dandyism” to come up with the feathered, nude look designed by Grace Wales Bonner. “The perfect ingredient to all great art is an element of ‘stink’,” twigs told Vogue. “That’s what Josephine had: an attitude which attracted and repelled.”

Willy Chavarria and Maluma 

Considering all the Zoot Suits in the house, Maluma might’ve chosen the perfect Latino designer: Willy Chavarría. The Colombian reggaetonero walked the carpet with the Mexican American fashion star in coordinated pachuco-inspired suits: Chavarria wore pink, while Maluma opted for a blue-green suit and top hats to tie it all together. The Chicano-inspired ‘fits of the pachuco era took inspiration from the Black jazz world of the Twenties and Thirties, so Maluma and Chavarria perfectly added a Latino perspective to this year’s theme.

Lizzo

Half gangster, half femme fatale, Lizzo stepped right of a 1930s noir with extra-long nails and a cigarette holder that should become a permanent accessory. The flashy blonde locks and deep violet lipstick are choice accents for a deconstructed Christian Siriano garment whose black-and-cream palette could have been inspired by Cruella de Vil.  

Shakira

Pretty in pink, but is she on theme? Shakira wore a gorgeous Prabal Gurung-designed crepe column gown with a gold, curvilinear design that accentuated the singer’s body, paired with a black lace glove. The Colombian star accompanied the Barbie-esque dress with a long, cape, reminiscent of Ariana Grande’s look at this year’s Oscars.

Keke Palmer

Keke Palmer may be her generation’s ultimate multi-hyphonate — the podcaster and YouTube creator is also starring in the upcoming remake of The Burbs, and has an album coming later this year, too. She stunned in a white gown dripping with pearls over a pair of tailored black capri pants — proving she knows how to stay on theme.

Shaboozey 

If he’s getting “Tipsy” tonight, it’s likely to be on champagne, not Jack Daniels. For a country star, Shaboozey had a surprisingly futuristic take on the Met Gala’s superfine theme, sporting an aquamarine grill, ring, watch, and torso’s worth of beads to offset a cropped black jacket with a trippy print and flouncy bow tie. The rakish hat adds a hint of UFO (complimentary). 

Rosalía

“I’m his mannequin!” Rosalía said, pointing at Olivier Rousteing, the French creative director of Balmain who made the custom look that is quite literally inspired by the mannequin. “It’s to honor his talent!” Rosalía wore her black hair back to to contrast with the fitted, plastic-looking bodice with a mermaid-style bottom of the dress.

Madonna

These days, the Met Gala may be overrun with pop elite, but Madonna showed up in a 1940s-cut cream tuxedo to prove she’s still the original.

Chance the Rapper and Donatella Versace

Well, it’s a “Tailored for You” party, and Chance the Rapper showed up with his tailor. Donatella Versace on his arm, he showcased a custom, loose-fitting, sand-colored suit from her legendary Italian house with a studded leather waistcoat and no shortage of shiny baubles. The designer herself wore a dress featuring ragged scales of black and silver.

André 3000

No better place to promote your new album than the Met Gala red carpet — and using fashion to do it. The musician, who dropped surprise EP 7 Piano Sketches earlier today, posed for photos in a suit wearing a piano as if it were a backpack, holding a black trash bag in one hand, and a red hat on his head.

Chappell Roan

Is this David Bowie’s offspring? Chappell Roan channeled the rock great in a patchworked fuchsia bell-bottom suit as she made her Met Gala debut. The “Pink Pony Club” singer accompanied the ‘fit with a matching coat with tinseled, feathered accents. She also wore her signature drag-style makeup with pink facepaint, and her red hair wild.

Janelle Monáe

Gala committee member Janelle Monáe has long served looks on the first Monday in May, and this year’s no different. With the help of designer Thom Browne and Oscar winning costume designer Paul Tazewell, the black, white, and red suit — paired with a monocle extending from her pin-stripe hat — adhered to the theme perfectly while showing off her usual edge. “Dandyism is pretty much a part of my fashion DNA through tailoring and suiting,” Monáe told the AP. “It fell right in line with who I am, and the people I want to bring with me that helped build this country.”

Rosé

Rosé had none other than Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello create a tailor-made black tuxedo-cut jacket with chunky sleeves, and paired with wide-leg trousers, seemingly from the fashion brand’s Fall/Winder 2022 runway. “He specifically made this tuxedo fit for this look… He sent me with red heels,” the star told Vogue showing off her pumps.

Future

The Atlanta rapper shocked some fans by showing up without his dreadlocks, having swapped them for shorter bleached curls, yet his threads were relatively understated: a hatched gray jumpsuit that had to be among the most comfortable items on display this year. With his shades, black tie, and leather driving gloves, he looked like he was ready for a clean getaway at any moment.

Clairo

No, you weren’t the only one who did a double-take when Clairo came through with Valentino Garavani’s Le Chat de La Maison clutch. The whimsical hand-painted accessory was quite the counterweight to a buttoned-up, semi-Victorian ensemble, though the black floral lace underneath was rather more revealing.   

Lisa

Lisa’s Met Gala look was full of details. The Blackpink star wore a tailored Louis Vuitton jacket over a bodysuit and lace tights adorned with a pearl chain belt. The singer’s bodysuit featured intricate portraits of iconic Black women stitched onto it by Henry Taylor, whom Pharrell Williams called a “genius,” per Vogue.

Cardi B

Which is the bigger power move: that mossy green, or the teased-up hair? Cardi B was a feast for the eyes, showing us (as though we needed reminding at this festival of forward fashion) that sometimes more is more. This wide-legged, 1970s-throwback Burberry design was just the thing for emphasizing a late, splashy entrance. 

Charli XCX

The Brat supreme has arrived! Charli XCX arrived in a custom Ann Demeulemeester look designed by Stefano Gallici. Chris Horan styled Charli’s look with a gorgeous feathered black cape, over a matching skirt and leather boots that feel aligned with the fashion she’s been delivering for her latest album era.

Tyla

This South African star looks like a princess on the Met Gala red carpet. Tyla wore a custom Jacquemus, wide-pinstriped dress styled by Law Roach that took direct inspiration from Black fashion icon André Leon Talley. With the off-the-shoulder dress and long cape, the “Water” singer continues her streak of iconic red carpet looks after last year’s headline-making Balmain gown made of sand.

Nicki Minaj

Another one to get the pinstripe memo, queen bee Nicki went for a two-piece that cinched at the knees and looked rather difficult to walk in. But there are moments when we have no choice but to suffer for fashion, and no doubt this is one of them. Turning her entire right shoulder and arm into the support structure for a gothic bouquet may present some other logistical challenges at dinner.

Lauryn Hill

With a lot of the black-tie formalwear at the Met Gala, you might forget it’s actually spring in New York. No such worries with the iconic Lauryn Hill, who came to remind you that April showers bring May flowers. The buttery yellow suit and swirling petal of a hooded cape exude pure seasonal joy, and the intricate golden scepter is perhaps the only objet d’art that can match her otherworldly voice. 

From Rolling Stone US.

The post Met Gala 2025: A$AP Rocky, Zendaya, and Cardi B Hit the Red Carpet appeared first on Rolling Stone India.

The 97th Academy Awards ran long per tradition, regardless of host Conan O’Brien’s joking claims about keeping to a tight schedule. The ceremony saw Sean Baker’s indie film Anora, made for $6 million and winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, dominate the proceedings with five wins out of six nominations, including Best Director, Film Editing, and Original Screenplay (all for Sean Baker), Best Actress for Mikey Madison, and, finally, Best Picture.

Still, there were plenty of highlights for fans of other top contenders, including Wicked — which provided a continuous musical theme for the evening. The Brutalist, another low-budget favorite, picked up three awards, including Best Actor for Adrien Brody — his second win in the category 22 years after he was recognized for his performance in The Pianist — while the heavily nominated Emilia Pérez nabbed two statues, including Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldaña, the first American of Dominican background to claim an Oscar.

Of course, the ceremony was not without its disappointments and head-scratching moments, because live TV never goes totally according to plan, and Academy voters can always be counted on for some baffling choices. Here’s our rundown of the highs, lows, and whoas that went down Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre stage Sunday night.

WTF: ‘Wicked’ Steals the Show Before It Even Starts

Wicked besties Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande got the Oscars off to a soaring start Sunday night with a musical medley that brought the audience on a journey through the extended Wizard of Oz universe. Grande emerged first, offering up a soulful rendition of the timeless classic “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” before Erivo joined her to pay homage to The Wiz, singing “Home,” performed by Diana Ross in the 1978 film. The pair then segued into their inevitable duet, “Defying Gravity,” the climax of Wicked (or Part One, anyway), with Erivo taking figurative flight for a chills-worthy finale. It was odd for just one Best Picture nominee to get all that prime real estate at the start of the show, but nobody seemed to mind the victory lap for 2024’s blockbuster musical, especially when the singers have pipes like these. —Miles Klee

Best: Conan O’Brien Takes Us Back to His Late-Night Heyday

It was a truly WTF year in terms of the lead-up to Oscars — so why not officially kick the show off with something that matched the delirium, the lunacy, and the sheer unpredictability of the post-nomination campaigning? The Academy likely thought it was hiring the Conan O’Brien who had years of talk-show hosting under his belt and did a very professional job emceeing the Emmys (twice). The guy who showed up on the Dolby Theater stage, however, was closer to the chaos agent responsible for his early Late Night years and the “Monorail” episode of The Simpsons. O’Brien did an entire throw-to-the-audience bit with Adam Sandler; teased Timothée Chalamet about his bright yellow suit (“You won’t get hit on your bike tonight”) and his age (showing a picture of a sonogram and saying it was a younger Timmy’s headshot); and ended with an elaborate musical number that featured a Dune sandworm playing “Chopsticks” on a piano. He even addressed the scandal surrounding Emilia Peréz star Karla Sofía Gascón’s tweets in a way that was sharp but not mean. It was absurd, it was funny, it set the perfect anything-goes tone from the jump. It was vintage Conan. —David Fear

Best: Kieran Culkin Becomes an Oscar Winner — and Maybe a Dad One More Time

Culkin winning Best Supporting Actor for his role in A Real Pain was one of the few sure things going into this Academy Awards. And given the goofy, off-the-cuff (and often profane) speeches he’d been giving as he collected a slew of statues leading up to the Oscars, it was an equally foregone conclusion that his thanks from the podium would be memorable. After being muted for close to 10 seconds when he gave a potty-mouthed shoutout to his Succession co-star and fellow nominee Jeremy Strong, Culkin sped through a few quick thank-yous before directly addressing his wife. Back when he won an Emmy in 2023, the actor joked from the stage about wanting a third child, and mentioned that his wife promised to deliver if he won. In this speech, he revealed that when he’d later privately joked that he wanted a fourth, Mrs. “Ye of Little Faith” said that she’d consider another kid if he ever won an Oscar. He then held up his statue as the crowd — and, thankfully, his wife — cracked up. —D.F.

Best: A Touching Tribute to Costumers and a History-Making Win

Everyone watches the Academy Awards for the big-name actors, so it’s not uncommon for behind-the-scenes nominees to get minimal camera time and vague descriptions of what they actually do. So it was a welcome surprise to see five stars of the films up for Best Costume Design — Conclave, Gladiator II, A Complete Unknown, Wicked, and Nosferatu — deliver personal and heartfelt appreciations of their costumers. Alas, only Bowen Yang was committed enough to wear his onscreen threads, a whimsical school uniform from Wicked, and he felt quite betrayed by his co-presenters, especially supposed “bestie” John Lithgow. But it was the musical fantasy that triumphed, thanks to the work of Paul Tazewell, who is now three-fourths of the way to an EGOT, having previously won a Tony and an Emmy. Tazewell began his speech by noting that he was the first Black man to claim an Oscar for costume design, which brought many in the audience to their feet with applause, among them Elphaba herself, Cynthia Erivo. —M.K.

WTF: The Dulcet Tones of… Nick Offerman?!

Those of you who wondered, “Is that Ron Swanson announcing the show?” early on the night were vindicated when host Conan O’Brien got into a brief argument with the voice of God — indeed supplied by none other than Nick Offerman. As O’Brien attempted to launch into an Oscars history lesson, Offerman interjected in whiskey-smooth voiceover to observe that it was the comedian’s first time hosting the Academy Awards. He proceeded to get into O’Brien’s head about the “pressure” he was under to perform at the top of his game, at one point musing: “A challenge this big coming so late in one’s career must weigh on a man’s soul.” An exasperated O’Brien finally told Offerman to quit interrupting and read the script he’d supplied. Offerman waited just a beat before blandly reading that O’Brien “is one of the great comedians of our time,” to the host’s apparent satisfaction. It’s not often that you get to see the accepted conventions of a televised award show turned upside-down; maybe other ceremonies should try shaking it up once in a while? —M.K.

Worst: A Straight-Outta-Vegas James Bond Tribute

Back in November, the longtime producers of the James Bond movies — Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli — were honored at the Academy’s Governor’s Awards, receiving the prestigious Irving Thalberg Memorial Award. So the decision to pay tribute to them at the Oscars had probably been in the works long before it was announced that Amazon had taken control of the 007 franchise, which had essentially been run like a family business for six decades. It would have been a not-great idea to honor these legends with a stage full of interpretive dancers (including Margaret Qualley?) and singers like Blackpink’s Lisa, Doja Cat, and Raye covering famous Bond-film themes, even if the lingering odor of this corporate takeover wasn’t still wafting in the air. To be fair, Raye’s cover of the opening song from Skyfall was sublime. But dear god, this was one Rob Lowe and Snow White away from the 1989 Oscars musical fiasco. —D.F.

Best: ‘No Other Land’ Filmmakers Call Out American Foreign Policy

The critically praised — yet still officially sans distribution — doc about the forced displacement of a community in the West Bank, filmed by both Palestinian and Israeli activists, had been an odds-on favorite to win the Best Documentary Oscar, though some feared that its unfiltered look at a hot-button topic would be too politically divisive to voters. When the quartet of filmmakers took the stage to accept the award, Palestinian director Basel Adra spoke first, mentioning that he hoped his daughter would not grow up in a landscape of “ethnic cleansing.” Then one of his Israeli comrades, Yuval Abraham, stepped to the mic and pointed out that, though the film was made in the spirit of cross-cultural love and cooperation, the country he lived in was one of freedom of movement, and Adra’s one of military law. Abraham offered that there is a path forward, and that “the foreign policy in this county is helping to block [that path]… There is another way. It’s not too late for life and the living. There is no other way.” For an evening in which politics had been a conspicuous absence (save Daryl Hannah shouting out Ukraine), the declaration felt like a much-needed nod to the world outside the theater. —D.F.

Worst: Give Diane Warren a Best Song Oscar Already

It’s not as though legendary songwriter Diane Warren is lacking for recognition: The creative force behind massive pop hits including Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” and Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” has won enough music-industry awards to fill a couple of display cases. But Warren has been unlucky when it comes to the Oscars, despite already earning an honorary statuette. She’s been nominated 16 times for Best Original Song since 1987, and every single year going back to 2017, yet she came up short once again with her latest entry, “The Journey.” Performed by Oscar-winning artist H.E.R., the anthem was featured in The Six Triple Eight, a historical drama about an all-Black, all-female battalion during World War II. Snagging the prize instead were husband-and-wife songwriters Clément Ducol and Camille for “El Mal,” sung by Zoe Saldaña in Emilia Pérez. Camille attempted to sing a bit herself during her thank-yous, to a somewhat tepid response from an audience that may have preferred to see Warren finally bring home the gold. —M.K.

Best: ‘Anora’ Is the Little Movie That Could

And lo, a screwball comedy about a sex worker shall lead them! Sean Baker’s delirious, indie-film answer to Pretty Woman cleaned up, taking home Oscars for Best Editing, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress (big up Mikey Madison!), and Best Picture, thus proving that fairy tales sometimes do come true. Baker used his Best Director speech to stump for the importance of the theatrical releases, and encouraged distributors, filmmakers, and moviegoers with kids to keep the big-screen experience alive. Both he and Madison gave shoutouts to the sex-worker industry, and at the end of a round of speeches from the producers after the Best Pic win, Baker added, “Long live independent film!” It felt like an uplifting end to a surprisingly giddy night for movie lovers. —D.F.

From Rolling Stone US.

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One of the greatest blood feuds in the history of rock has supposedly been resolved: 15 years after brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher torpedoed the global phenomenon that was their band, Oasis will reunite for a 2025 live tour. It’s a truce that fans thought they’d never see — and many are joking that it can’t possibly last.

The Gallagher beef dates all the way back to when the boys shared a bedroom in their childhood home and became the stuff of music legend as Oasis conquered the charts with their Britpop sound in the Nineties: physical fights and bickering interviews, one or the other quitting the band or abandoning a tour, all of it fueled by booze and drugs. Their sibling rivalry raged on until the elder Noel walked away for good in 2009, describing Liam as “a man with a fork in a world of soup.” Liam would go on to start a Twitter account that he used to mock Noel, often calling him a “potato.” Each took every opportunity to snipe at his brother in the press, often casting blame for the demise of Oasis (and their ongoing failure to get the band back together).

So, how far can we trust the promise of arena concerts to be held — gulp — 11 months from now? That’s an eternity for a relationship that could detonate at any second, and despite the excitement, there’s understandable trepidation about shelling out a small fortune for tickets. That anxiety has taken the form of memes from those who believe we’re bound to have our hearts broken by yet another acrimonious Gallagher split. Predictions of stage meltdowns, references to the ruined friendship depicted in the film The Banshees of Inisherin, and compassion for the tour manager are all appropriate here. Yes, you should definitely pay extra for the event insurance.

But there are reasons to remain optimistic. If Liam is at all motivated by spite — and his history with Noel suggests he is — he could mount the reunion just to prove the naysayers wrong. On Sunday, he was tweeting “Your attitude stinks” at anyone claiming the shows wouldn’t happen next year (or will otherwise disappoint). A climactic comeback would also preclude The 1975‘s Matty Healy from delivering further pronouncements on how the Gallagher boys need to top wasting time and bury the hatchet; such comments have irked Liam in recent years. Maybe they even motivated the reconciliation? Another theory: the rock stars behind “Champagne Supernova” were feeling eclipsed by Chappell Roan‘s “Red Wine Supernova.” Or they were simply inspired by Charli XCX and Lorde to work it out on the remix.

Whatever the cause of this unexpected fraternal love, the adoring masses will be ready to do battle when the U.K. and Ireland concert tickets go up for sale on Aug. 31. (Other dates, including those for North America, have yet to be announced.) The competition and prices have the potential to match the frenzy for Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour, except among people who remember when MTV aired music videos. Although, who knows? Perhaps younger generations will get swept up in Oasis nostalgia once “Wonderwall” hits TikTok. Stranger things have happened. Like the Gallaghers getting back together, for example.

From Rolling Stone US.

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