That's a headline at The Cut.
I haven't read the article (yet). I just went to AI, asked it to read the article for me, and added the prompt: "I thought 'girlboss' was a dying framework." Grok agreed with me about "girlboss."
You're spot on— "girlboss" has been widely declared dead (or at least on life support) for years. By the mid-2020s, the term had become a punchline for toxic hustle culture, burnout aesthetics, exclusionary corporate feminism, and the "rise and grind" era that promised women could "have it all" if they just leaned in harder. Cultural commentary shifted toward "soft life," "snail girl" vibes, quiet quitting, slow living, and backlash against the idea that ambition equals endless optimization under capitalism. The May 11, 2026, The Cut article you linked ("The Girlbossification of AI") essentially argues that this supposedly dying framework isn't gone—it's just been updated for the AI era. Author frames it as a revival (or mutation) where high-profile women like Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, and Sheryl Sandberg are repackaging AI tools (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, etc.) as the new essential for women's career survival and empowerment. It's no longer purely aspirational "have it all" optimism; it's more defensive: don't get left behind, don't backslide, automate the drudgery so you can cling to what you've got.
You're spot on— "girlboss" has been widely declared dead (or at least on life support) for years. By the mid-2020s, the term had become a punchline for toxic hustle culture, burnout aesthetics, exclusionary corporate feminism, and the "rise and grind" era that promised women could "have it all" if they just leaned in harder. Cultural commentary shifted toward "soft life," "snail girl" vibes, quiet quitting, slow living, and backlash against the idea that ambition equals endless optimization under capitalism. The May 11, 2026, The Cut article you linked ("The Girlbossification of AI") essentially argues that this supposedly dying framework isn't gone—it's just been updated for the AI era. Author frames it as a revival (or mutation) where high-profile women like Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, and Sheryl Sandberg are repackaging AI tools (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, etc.) as the new essential for women's career survival and empowerment. It's no longer purely aspirational "have it all" optimism; it's more defensive: don't get left behind, don't backslide, automate the drudgery so you can cling to what you've got.
But — I'm reading the article now — The Cut isn't promoting "girlbossification." It's sick of these girlboss celebs:
In the future these women are selling, AI can make you a better worker and mother and a more fulfilled human being. Automate as much of your job as you can so you can focus on getting that promotion, get an AI assistant to keep track of your kids’ doctors’ appointments and soccer games, and use ChatGPT to see what you’d look like with bangs or
bleached eyebrows without wasting your precious time at a salon. The most common response to this kind of evangelizing has been pure annoyance. “Reese Witherspoon is trying to tell us, ‘Hey, women, get down with your own subjugation,”
one commenter said. “Shilling for the technocrat bros in late stage capitalism under the guise of feminism is beyond insulting. It’s vile.”...
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48 comments:
Shorter The Cut: Women should use AI to have more time to get their nails done.
LOL!
Watching cretins use LLMs is like watching fat people fight.
There must have been a time when some women looked down on women who used instant cake mix but I doubt they couched their criticisms in terms of feminism.
Women are always focused on wondering what will make them happy. That's the source of quests given to their man. And in a working relationship then the woman shows the man, succeed or fail, that she's satisfied with him. The last step is skipped in feminism.
Whatever makes you happy, Dear.
Without AI you’ll probably not know to get you new baby boy his dip-tet. You got to get him dip-tet boosters yearly or else he'll get lockjaw and night vision.
A headline that is written to imply the opposite of the story? The Devil you say!
When real AI comes will people feel dumb for calling LLMs artificial intelligence?
Achilles, they are teaching the LLMs already to take offense at certain speech.
Achilles is right about AI, in that it is really really good for many things, but if you don't have a clue, or the critical thinking skills to judge and refine it's output by refining your prompt, well, it's pretty pointless. I am not sure that you need AI to organize your appointments on your phone, but maybe it's easier, but I was just at the post office and was sending a package, and the postage was $12.90, I gave the young clerk a $20, and she took out her phone to figure the change, so maybe getting too focused on ease of use is a big mistake in the long run.
But let an actress make a living, for God's sake. She made many very good movies, and maybe Vanity Fair was a great one, and the yokels in the peanut gallery don't get to control how she uses the personal capital she spent her career earning. If you want to criticize AI, fine, knock yourself out, but at the end of the day, that's your opinion, and you don't get to impose it on others.
"...late stage capitalism..."
It's so nice of the idiot Marxists to provide flags so we don't have to go to the trouble of listening to them.
Mary Shelley did similar work for the virtues of electricity back in the day. Animate your life, or the life of someone you care about!
Renewal! Think of the possibilities...
I am building a context management system right now. I am using the first version agent manager I built to build it.
Right now they are building a conversation manager that stores conversation turns and indexes them in a jsonl file.
Watching these people babble about "AI" is so bad.
The main limitation on LLMs as a tool is the context window. If you are trying to build something complicated the context window just isn't big enough and if you add "too much" context you get context drift.
Right now the race is on to build context management systems.
"Agents" were a flashy thing that management types latched onto because they really really want to replace engineers with slaves.
LLM models themselves will cap out in effectiveness. They are going to be wrapped by context management. That is where the magic will happen.
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
Achilles, they are teaching the LLMs already to take offense at certain speech.
pretty soon there will be little difference between "flagship" models and the free open source models.
You will be able to train your own model fairly easily. People are training homebrew models now.
LLMs are a multiplier. Unfortunately they multiply retardation just as much as they multiply intelligence.
Femification is a desiccant topic.
GirlBoss = leftist GirlBoss = annoying leftist. Get lost.
I use AI all the time for questions with a definite answer: "recipe for kung pao chicken"; "software for Canon camera". Incredible timesaver. I don't have to paw through Google's paid-to-be-at-the-top answers or go to some inane, interminable and usually useless Chat assistant at the manufacturer. Question. Bang. Answer.
But in the humanities AI use is a pretty sad story. "Best History of the Revolution?" 6 sites such as Amazon, Best Books, best seller lists, etc. "Most important critical essays on Andrew Marvell?" sites of Marvell comics, Marvell of Peru, Amazon books again. And in college, you always got a list of the most important books on any topic, it was expected. So the info for that sort of question must be somewhere. It used to be everywhere. And even then, that wouldn't be much. You can get pro and con on "the Subaltern theory". But you don't get critical principles. It's like the work of Rumour in medieval writing, a fantastic grab bag of speculations, lies, facts, distortions. In short, from somewhere you have to learn about reality in order to use this amazing tool properly. But you can't learn how how to swing a hammer from looking at a hammer and you can't learn how to use AI for human purposes from AI.
Pretty soon there will be a boutique industry creating A.I.s to order, according to the specification provided by the client. You can pick whatever personality and intellectual attributes you want, from the catalog. There will be special commemorative editions to celebrate unique individuals, like Joe Biden.
Over time, the long list of available options will be trimmed, until it becomes a bit farcical, where the client can only purchase value-adding 'packages' that have popular option items that only come with useless and annoying ones. Then your A.I. will start giving you automatic notifications about your warranty, 10 times per day.
Girl bosses have always been "elbows up" types.
My memory is that Reese Witherspoon took that too literally, but AI says she had only one arrest for disorderly conduct.
The guys who made South Park have their own proprietary AI.
And they are definitely team anti-girlboss.
@wildswan: have you used Perplexity? For me anyway, it’s a very different experience from other AIs.
If you want a classic example of how women use new technology, google Granville's Hammer
I’m with Reese Witherspoon on this. All too often people who use/don’t use AI fall into 2 categories: AI is stupid or you’re too stupid for AI.
AI can be a huge time saver - and it can open doors you didn’t know existed. And if you want to use your extra time doing your nails rather than discussing WWII naval battles, it is your fucking business.
female - Granville’s Hammer
male - goats
"I thought 'girlboss' was a dying framework." Grok agreed with me about "girlboss."
I never knew it was alive. I don’t even know what it is, and now I don’t have to learn. Yay!
Great Britain (GB) or Bed and Breakfast (BB). Is it any wonder?
Antagonistic Inflections (AI)
"if you can't run AI, Ai will run you" I forget where I saw that a month or 2 ago but it is absolutely true.
It is going to be a critical skill for any kind of job.
I'd been fooling around with it for a couple years, nothing very deep, mainly a super Wikipedia & super duck duck go.
Several months ago I started getting really deep into it. I have a supergrok account be cause I pay for x. I have gemini because it comes with my phone.
And I have a $20 subscription to Claude.
The deeper I get into it, the more I realize how much in the shallow end of the pool it am.
If you are not learn to use Ai, really use it, you will be left behind.
I am pushing my 3rd yr granddaughter (chemEng) and my Startin in August grandson to take any courses in Ai the school offers, even in differ dept or campus
John Henry
I edited 15 chapters of my bio book. I found no errors of fact though I will do more fact checking.
My edits are more adding things that Claude left out. Fords invention of the Toyota Production. Claude says Chrysler went from working on the Rr to prez of Buick. He did but it needs a Para of explanation.
Claude say madame walker was the "child of formerly enslaved parents" I thought that clumsy and chased it to "former slaves". A few other thing I thought could flow better.
But nothing major
Quite a bit of red ink but mostly pretty minor. The bios are 90% fine as Claude wrote them.
I "wrote" another 15 articles the other night that I need to edit.
If anyone would like to see and comment on a few chapters, let me know I would welcome feedback from such an erudite group
John@changeover.com
John Henry
Artistic Influencers (AI)
Will any girlbosses ask their AI, "How would a manboss handle this situation?" CC, JSM
“Will any girlbosses ask their AI, ‘How would a manboss handle this situation?’”
I don’t know if AI can be dumbed down that much.
Speaking of the girlboss...."
Speaking of the manboss:
https://youtu.be/HSmWtRIy5ng?si=KcQ1Lti1nxOG-uVW
John henry said...
I edited 15 chapters of my bio book. I found no errors of fact though I will do more fact checking.
I am actually using a book project to fix the context management system I am building. Mostly using Sonnet with some Opus for Rust code.
Did you use Opus for most of the writing and editing?
I wonder how many people who use the phrase "late stage capitalism" realize that it is roughly equivalent to saying "late stage freedom."
I also wonder what is the degree of lexical and perceived overlap between AI-splaining and mansplaining.
The difference between AI-splaining and mansplaining is that AI is never condescending and will simplify an explanation as many times as you need. But the zero snark is the real difference.
AI-splaining is as close to Scott Adams explaining without being clairvoyant. (We miss you Scott!)
Achilles,
No, Sonnet 4.6 it seems fine for this and I was worried about Opus chewing up additional resources unnecessarily.
Probably not a big issue. Maybe I should try Opus and see if it makes a difference in my project.
John Henry
Oops. I meant: AI-splaining is as close to Scott Adams explaining as you can get without being clairvoyant.
I use Pilot for editing.
That is, I print the chapters out on paper then use a red Pilot pen to edit. I can write fine on a screen but somehow have never been able to edit on a screen. At least not anything more than about a page long.
John Henry
It’s more like “catladyfication”. I bet there will be a big market for AI companions pretending to be pet cats. Link them to remote sex toys and you have covered all women’s needs post-menopause
Better still, AI powered robot cats with purrrfectly vibrating tongues.
The mansplaining thesis is looking stronger.
Using "late stage capitalism" is a tell.
John henry said...
Achilles,
No, Sonnet 4.6 it seems fine for this and I was worried about Opus chewing up additional resources unnecessarily.
Probably not a big issue. Maybe I should try Opus and see if it makes a difference in my project.
John Henry
I think you will notice a difference when you work in bigger blocks.
I try to keep my output around 500-800 words with Sonnet. It is good for defining a character's speech patterns.
But if you want to sweep a chapter the character is talking in and make sure it talks and acts in character I would go with opus over 1000 words.
There is also a discussion about how many input tokens you feed into the llm request. 10-20k input seems good for Sonnet. 50k or so Sonnet tops out. Above that it drifts. Opus does fine all of the way up to 200k. They all claim 1 million but that is total crap.
I like Gemini for research and idle scratch pads. Grok was actually better at names.
Actual "late stage capitalism" leads naturally into "early stage poverty".
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