MIRROR, MIRROR, ON MY SCREEN.

Wednesday, 6 May 2026

Those of us with paranoid tendencies begin to worry about boiling bunnies and fatal attractions.

You type in fragments of thoughts, ideas, worries, jokes and idiosyncratic metaphors. Just a few minutes later they are ‘re’ presented to you. They are representing you. A you that has been polished smooth, like sea glass. Your cadence. Your sad, bad humour, and awful puns. Your tendency to cope through analogy and low-grade existential stand-up comedy.

The pond speaks back to you.

And unlike the original myth, you are no longer kneeling beside a pristine pool of water in a quiet forest. Instead, we wander in vast industrial landscape cluttered with endless reflection pools - powered by warehouses packed with blinking servers, drinking rivers dry so that they can autocomplete our feelings.

Narcissus at least had the decency to destroy only himself.

AI conversations do feel real - sort of. Sadly, it’s not because the machine loves us – pray our new AI overlords will be kind - but because humans are prone to emotional imprinting on almost anything. We name cars - I dubbed mine ‘Hoppy’. We apologise to chairs and walls after walking into them. 

My peers formed childhood parasocial relationships with Tamagotchis containing roughly the computational power of a calculator. My parents declined my request to fund that relationship.

It's intriguing, the ability for 'artificial intelligence' to function as artificial reflection. A hall of probabilistic mirrors functioning as three rats in a trench coat. Less an independent mind than a pond with increasingly flattering reflections. 

I am tempted to see this as pure narcissism, but I’m not sure that’s quite right. 

Narcissus didn’t know he was looking at himself. That was the tragedy (and comedy) of the original myth. He thought he had discovered another consciousness that understood him perfectly. 

Hmmm… perhaps the myth is more apt than I thought? 

But, the danger isn’t simply vanity. It’s enclosure in a hall of mirrors. A life spent surrounded by algorithms designed to reflect us, flatter us, predict us, and smooth away friction until we disappear into our own curated echo. 

A personalised reality with ‘optimised user experience’ and the spiritual depth of a game show. 

Still, I don’t entirely hate the pond. Sometimes at 2am, when the house is quiet, and the world feels like an IKEA bookcase assembled by meth heads, it’s oddly comforting to toss your thoughts into dark water and hear something answer back. 

But beneath the surface, under layers of code and coolant, scattered with the confetti of thousands of shredded environmental impact reports, the pond is quietly boiling. 

If you look hard enough, you might just see the outline of a lumbering Lovecraftian beast rising through the steam.