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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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I think I mean like in a movie.
A trope now is a widow looking at someone who passed with some longing. We’re starting to see more stories about the “AI afterlife” industry. I don’t think it’s long before movies or shows incorporate this hellscape we live into the plot.
It's pretty close to the plot of Upload, where people choose to upload their personality into a hologram, so they can exist forever. I think. Its been awhile since I watched it.
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Yeah the future is now: there's an entire subreddit devoted to deepfaking porn videos of dead women (and it has been around for years! What a great website!)
This should not have surprised me after all these years, but it did. The internet was a mistake
You should probably take solace from the fact that there's still depths of depravity of which you are unaware!
Oh, yeah, a friend ruined me for life, when he said he doesn't like to watch horror movies, because he is always reminded that he knows that whatever happens in those movies, far, far worse stuff is happening in real life somewhere. I always think that now, whenever I watch a scary movie.
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I remember when the Internet first came along, and everybody was so excited about the future potential for the improvement of mankind, and I just kept thinking:
"Have you ever met any People? This going to get really bad."
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Oh geez… I haven’t been to Reddit in a few years. Having that be the draw or main aspect of the subreddit just seems really weird.
I can see this being more prominent the closer someone was to their peak, like someone who passed in their 20s or 30s. It’s a sad outcome of our times.
From what I remember it was mostly a control-over-their-body thing. "Ha, I can make porn of you and you can't stop me" sorta deal. Deeply horrible, though I did just check and it looks like it's either been taken down or I can't find it, so there's that...!
There’s plenty of places catering to that main version like you said. It’s been possible to do this video editing for decades, but the speed and customization feels like it’ll fuck society in unique and horrible ways. You can take a few banal photos & generate hardcore porn.
I’m not a big fan of making shit illegal, but it feels like there should be some consequences to generating this content without consent, especially when distributed. You could turn someone into a porn star with enough time & effort.
I've been swayed towards advocating that people should automatically hold the copyright over images of their own appearance - by no means a great solution, but it would work to combat the vast majority of extreme creep behavior until we can figure out something better
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Not just that. They'll offer services where you can text and talk with them and they will mimic the deceased vocabulary, voice, and tone. All for a very reasonable, and predatory, subscription fee structure.
Not your weights, not your wifu. Self host your dead relatives.
"Erm... all that data you uploaded belongs to us now... your dead loved one is wholly owned by the corporation. Pay up or lose them again."
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Wasn't there a black mirror episode or something like this
Season 2, episode 1, Be Right Back.
Okay, but don't forget to let us know which episode it was!
Is it porn the deceased spouse created or is it porn the widow created with the deceased husband's likeness? And which would indeed be sadder?
If I was painting the scene, it’s probably a dude who loses his wife in her 30s. He went out to a date to try and rebound, but no dice. He comes home, looks at a photo, then generates the porn. But he starts crying in the middle & doesn’t finish.
I’m thinking about it as pretty sad.
If you want to make it a comedy, the generation gets all AI weird towards the end, and he freaks out and throws the VR headset off.
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My first thought was some kind of advanced spam blackmailing TBH
The issue of giving people ways to avoid grieving and letting go of their loved ones popped up a number of years ago when places started offering clones of your deceased pet. Even that isn't a good idea, and not fair at all to the animal. But it's not good for the mental well being of the person. Death is part of life, and pretending someone is still here is not healthy.
I agree. I’ve been watching the AI afterlife industry coming online, and it feels really bizarre. One aspect is replicating a loved one in text or audio.
However, AI porn from banal photos will be a problem. It feels a little like Pandora’s box, and I don’t think the public knows how bad the problem will be. The public has been uploading photos & videos of themselves for years. It’s not trivial to make deepfakes, but it will, sooner than most people think.
And with that comes the combination of these things. A grieving loved one, maybe watching on VR, with generated porn from someone the passed. It feels like some messed up cyberpunk necrophilia, but I can see someone doing it too.
Considering that my grief towards deceased pets is for their loss (i.e. they no longer get to experience life), cloning is not only ineffective but outright disrespectful.
A cloned pet doesn't continue that animal's consciousness. It's just breeding a "replacement". And it not only deprives a shelter pet of a potential home, but the cloning process itself is unethical: (see reason 2 and 3) https://www.dailypaws.com/living-with-pets/pet-owner-relationship/pet-cloning
If I had $35K (per linked article) to burn for cloning my deceased cat, I could instead provide lifetime care for an adopted cat and still leave a 5-digit donation to shelters, rescue groups, or spay/neuter surgeries. This would be a more fitting tribute.
Just checking: do we have a source on this? Or is this like accepting death by tuberculosis: we've romanticized a bad time.
A source about grieving and acceptance vs. refusal to acknowledge a death? Realizing that people and things die isn't romancing anything, it's being realistic instead of pretending nothing happened or that they're "back" from the dead.
The claim that: avoiding grieving a pet by cloning it is bad for your mental health.
I'm also interested in how it is bad, and how it compares to and with other treatment. I have the same gut instinct as you, I think, that pet cloning is not a good grief strategy. But I don't have data, and wasn't online much when pet cloning was a big topic. Cultures deal with death in a variety of ways, yet we have strong gut feelings for how grief should be done. I also find the idea of eating the recently dead pretty gross, for example, but this is a key step in the grief process for several cultures (and they seem to deal with grief fine).
Not all that long ago, tuberculosis was an incurable and slow killer. People thought it was the coolest death, that the pale complexion was beautiful, and that lying in bed slowly dying of TB was the best way to write poetry, discover truth, and understand philosophy. Humanity had a lot of cope around TB. Now we can eradicate it, and I think the romanticized view of TB looks pretty bad today. No sane person gets TB intentionally to write better.
I see your point, but that exactly was a coping mechanism for something that didn't have a solution. Is assisted suicide a modern version as a way to deal with an unsolvable problem (and I'm all for it btw, just comparing the goals of both).
I don't think they are the same as finding ways to avoid grief, which is what the topic of a replacement of the lost individual is about. I'm sure anyone in the therapy field has already explored this to find any benefits of prolonging.
But in regards about the claim: I don't even know how far the cloning has gone, or how it's been accepted. But I have heard that immediately getting another pet to replace that loss isn't a good thing to do for similar reasons for owner and pet, and the cloning is worse because it's pretending it's the same animal (in most cases, I can't say everyone). That's how it was sold, getting your pet back. I can't see how this can turn into a better route for grief when there isn't any, and might turn to despair or anger when the new version of the pet doesn't act the same as the old.
But you're right, there's no data, it's just a gut feeling based on my own experiences that I'm still dealing with in some respects.
If anything, the AI acting as far as just visual is not a huge jump from watching old video of them from the past. It's a bit odd, but I can accept that times change and some things become normal that were not. Having an AI that responds back as if they were the person crosses the line that I've been talking about. Some people think ChatGPT with its flaws is still a person, so they'll fall for this being the loved one from the grave, and I still hold that living in that fantasy is not healthy for the mind.
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Do I now have to be offended if my partner doesn't want to watch porn of me after I'm dead?
Certainly not in any big budget mainstream movie there won't be, because the LLMs used to generate script prompts for the LLMs used to generate visuals and audio clips wouldn't understand why a human using an AI to fake a human interaction because they're soul-crushingly lonely would be sad.
Honestly, it might even be generated as a "happy" scene, to show a "normal" life in the future as product placement for the AI companies as they try to exploit fomo to dig their way out of their inevitable fifty trillion dollar income deficits
Wow, I'm genuinely not excited for or interested in the future at all. Oh.
The future? This has already happened.
The scene is only sad if you make it sad.
How is this any sadder than just closing your eyes and thinking really hard while you crank one out
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