Girlfriend Filter
A Quirky AI Tool Is Available For People To Play Around With: Why It May Just Be The Downfall of Society As We Know It (Yet I love AI!)
First off, thank you so much for reading Jumbotron. It was a story I never told, and more importantly, I think I made my point, which is we GOT to talk to young kids about life before they develop generations worth of weird relationships because of the repression they grow up with.
I don’t think you need to be Andrew “Dice” Clay around young people, but my goodness, have some real conversations with them.
Formerly Problematic is a collection of thoughts I have as a 40-something now, and sometimes they will include stories about me and sometimes I will be an old man yelling at clouds. This one is a little of both.
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Being an awkward, ugly teenager didn’t really work out well for me. I was bullied. I was hazed. In fact, the reasons I had such a bad high school life were the very reasons I think I wanted to know everything about the NM State Basketball Scandal. I knew how these things worked between groups of men.
It’s all a lame-ass dick-measuring contest. Who’s going to bark the loudest, throw the most elbows, and climb over everyone else to be king of the group? You see it in locker rooms. You see it in boardrooms and office complexes as well.
But the one thing about going to high school in the 1990s-Early 2000s was that much like the parents of those kids did in the 70s and early 1980s, status symbols were all the range. Whether it is a Z28 Camaro, a Members Only Jacket or having the best weed in school, people my parents age gave a shit about what others thought of them.
My era? Same thing. It was about who had the loudest stereo, the best weed, the best parties, and of course, who did you date?
Well, thankfully in high school, probably the stereo thing was the only thing I applied for nomination for. Haha. I didn’t have the requisite subwoofers to outbump my classmates on some Dr. Dre shit.
Kids in the 2020s. My God. What the fuck are these kids going to do?
Holy Hell. They are DOA in my opinion.
Now, I have mellowed a lot in the last decade or so, but I cannot brake for teenagers at the moment. I currently have one niece that is a teenager with several more nieces and nephews in the next few years crossing that line. If I had a kid right now, they wouldn’t be a teenage until nearly the 2040s (!!!!!!) so we’ll see what things impact him or her then.
The kids today… God, I sound like an old man. The kids today… are all about status symbols but are rarely about effort. The “gimme gimme gimme” is now a rallying cry more than it ever was about the Me Generation (80s) or the Millennials like myself, who are universally called soft by most people. No offense taken. I agree. A lot of us are soft.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha as these kids are called all have access to the best weed, because mom and dad frequent the local dispensaries where recreational and if in a state that’s only medicinal, they certainly still have good weed because they have a medical card.
(Note, this is likely the most I have ever talked about weed in anything I ever wrote. I don’t do drugs. I tried once or twice, but this is not my existence, but it was my surroundings.)
If they aren’t into marijuana, there is likely something they are on, because their mom and dad sought a chemical solution to a perceived emotional problem.
The value of the dollar is lost on them.
Adding your Cash App handle to your profile on social media even if you aren’t selling/creating content is just hoping some millionaire finds you cool and gives you money.
What kind of nonsensical shit is that?
They will go the extreme lengths to show everyone they did a Dubai Chocolate pull-apart, got the latest Air Jordans and spend hundreds of dollars on headphones to just listen to some weird aluminum foil being balled up ASMR BS instead of actual music.
I thought I would be different, and be understanding of younger people as I got older, because I thought I was an iconoclast in the late 1990s and I thought that challenging norms would be a strong suit for these kids, but no they are just weird.
Now, I have my face buried in a screen a lot for work purposes, so I am not going to comment on how they spend their time, it’s how they DON’T spend their time which is concerning to me. Men are no longer interesting in talking to girls, getting to know girls or making an effort to be around girls.
These young men say “Bruh” to some sweet thing as they are chatting with them while playing a Call of Duty game on Twitch instead of developing an actual game… You know confidence? This hot girl isn’t a “bruh.”
Now, this isn’t an Elon Musk “We are underpopulated in this world. We need more babies!” type of rant. No, because I even think that is weird, but young men have painted themselves into a corner.
The phrase “incels” is popular now, because they are everywhere in our society. They are involuntarily celibate, yes, but they do themselves no favors by not ingratiating themselves to anyone, much less women.
Incels have doubled in population since 2008, with 27%, which is almost 1 in 3 of men under 30, not having any physical contact with a member of the opposite sex. That’s a crazy amount.
Most incels, according to the Anti-Defamation League are heterosexual men who blame women and society for their lack of romantic success.
Isn’t that the culture though? Blame everyone for your lot in life, and give me a pill that takes the edge off and lets me suffer through existence a little less.
I don’t have a girlfriend. Why? Because women are stupid and don’t realize that there are video game streamers that make a living playing games and they think it’s stupid.
These are literally things people say. Look it up.
It’s so damn sad and pathetic to be honest.
As someone who was PAINFULLY shy in high school (and yes, I do have things to blame for that as well) I am blown away by the sheer lack of effort by these kids. Even though no one liked it in high school. I worked hard on developing a voice, a thought process, and yes, even a sense of humor that has carried me into life today.
These kids quit at the first breath of hard work and just look at “the system” to blame why they can’t find someone of the opposite sex.
As mentioned, I am buried in a screen a lot too, so I don’t begrudge anyone any TikTok or any social media. I became James on social media more than I ever did in school, I get that. But that’s not what is happening here. Everything is a box to be checked now.
What are these weaklings afraid of?
I want to show you a picture from 2008
This is two months before I met the woman who would be my wife. I was 25 years old. I was on my first solo trip to Vegas.
My friend James flaked on me last minute, and rather than cancel a Vegas trip and sit at home while BofA paid me, I still went.
One minor adjustment to my trip: I didn’t want to drive myself, so I took a AMTRAK train to Vegas. I was going to Vegas to meet up with a friend and party with her for a couple nights and then fly back (my first ever plane ride) to ABQ to go to Portales to ENMU where the “girl of my dreams” was going to be waiting for me in a hotel room.
(That one didn’t go so well. We can talk about that again someday haha)
Aside from the train bit, does that sound like the shyest kid in school just 7 years earlier?
HELL NO!
It was because I tried. I made a trip with a friend where we would just eat and fart and drink and gamble into something where I had 2 different women to hang out with… and then that picture above.
Last night of my first solo trip, it was the day after my 25th birthday. I got asked as I was walking by if I wanted to go to a “private event” at this bar in Vegas, I said yes, and I was given maybe 10 drinks for free. There I mingled with these dudes who were in town for a big boxing event that happened the weekend before.
There were from Wales and they looked like they had money. They treated me like an equal. It was amazing. Bunch of drunk UK people drinking Guinness Draught and singing these weird songs tied to their boxer.
Then there were these girls in bikinis (not hookers or workers at the bar) that were in these hot tubs in the outside of the business. The Welsh boxing guys went out there and we just were talking to them about everything and anything.
The girls asked me what I did and who I was. I didn’t lie. I was James from New Mexico and I am a banker (though I was just a teller at the time) and I got a 30-minute conversation out of it with those three girls.
Old man James who remembers everything CANNOT remember their names today!
But I have that picture.
I just remember in the middle of talking to the girl on the right, I saw her listening to what I was saying, and it finally clicked to me,
“Holy crap, this is what happens when you just TRY!”
These babes was listening to this 25-year old trailer park raised Mexican kid who was wearing a button up shirt that belonged to his AUNT.
Yes, I am wearing my aunt’s shirt in that photo! :)
These girls don’t know I made $142.10 a week at BofA just 2 years before that as a part-timer. They didn’t care.
From that moment on, almost nothing scared me. Yes, I get nervous, but I am not afraid to put myself out there.
I had three girls in a Vegas hot tub hanging on my every word like I was Nick Pappagiorgio in Vegas Vacation, except I didn’t have 4 cars, I had a fucking train ticket with a bunch of people many different ages or races that were afraid of flying haha.
Even when I met my wife, and even when we first became a couple, that photo meant a lot to me. It helped me assert to whoever I thought I was… that Alpha male (Meaning a type A personality, not Gen Alpha, which are wusses) I hated less than a decade before. I was proud of that photo. I still am proud of that photo because I told you the story leading up to it.
I think for a long time though, I was disrespectful to my wife, then my girlfriend, by trying to still be something I no longer wanted to be, and every day from here on, I try to be constantly better at life.
But all that craziness led me to her.
The partying with my female friend didn’t pan out, nor did the Portales thing and the girls in the hot tub were just a conversation I had and free drinks, but I had 3 trips to the plate which led me to eventually meeting the woman I want to spend forever with.
Which leads me to today.
I really thought one thing would come out of COVID, and that was the great equalizer of confidence. Meaning? That the uber-confident people who were sheltered in place for a year would lose a little bit of mojo, and the nerdy, awkward incels who couldn’t talk to a girl if she was taking his order at Wendy’s would stay the same.
However, even though they remained the same, the gap was narrowed from popular and confident person to shy introverted person.
The nerds finally have a chance to steal a pretty girl.
I really thought that during COVID. Everyone was wearing a mask, so everyone can MASK what they really were about, much like I did two decades ago in dating girls one town over who didn’t grow up with me.
Well, for as much as I like to say I am RIGHT ALL THE DAMN TIME, I was totally wrong now.
People are even worse off. Those nerdy introverted men are even worse now. Buoyed my uber-confident creeps like Andrew Tate telling them how to act, they now are shy AND disrespectful to women. They have no game, but act like their feces doesn’t smell. They are the worst.
They are the types I deal with on sports Twitter for work. They are the types who think everything is a joke or a tee-off to slam Biden or Trump. Not everything is something. Stop talking in group think and have some individuality. It’s all gone now. These men are lost forever. I will show you why.
In 2025, with the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI Tools, photo and video manipulation are now prevalent in today’s culture. Now, for work purposes I use AI to create funny cartoons to help drive eyeballs to my content or to sort out stats. It’s how you SHOULD use those tools, especially if you need help marketing. So, I am not pot calling the kettle black here, but the people who are using the tools now treat it like a video game that they play hours on instead of getting out of the house.
The screen kids are still screen kids, except now they are trying to manipulate their sad reality.
May 2025 brought us the Girlfriend Filter on CapCut, which is a service you use in conjuction with TikTok to edit videos. My Auntie Twinkle is a genius at that!
But someone came up with a filter that takes a still photo of you and then it creates a sexy woman, usually in a skirt and is very voluptuous, who creeps up on you and kisses you like she is your girlfriend.
This was the first video I ever saw with it.
It was very cool and young James might have bit a lot of times on the apple to create these (note, I did anyway to tell a story on here) in order to show what a ladies man I was.
Problem?
That young man is good looking. Good head of hair, smile, preppy dress. There’s no world where that guy can’t have a date every night of the week, even if he was a total idiot. So I got a little mad at the video.
Then I saw this guy:
This one creeped me out, because in another life, this man could have been me. No chin, 13 hairs on his face that he calls a beard and is doing that photo angle that for some reason a lot of chubby men do and that is take the photo from the chin up which is wholly unflattering.
Then the AI video generated because how the photo is framed looks like he is just ogling her breasts instead of actually doing a lovey dovey bf/gf filter like the filter is supposed to do. So weird and gross.
The worst thing? He likely thinks it’s the coolest thing ever and will NEVER try to replicate that photo in real life or try to better himself to try to see if he could make that happen like I did with weight loss and gym time and a lot of trial and error.
Nope, he will share it with his Fortnite friends and his libido and confidence will wilt like the tress I planted in June here in Las Cruces.
The technological progressive in me LOVES things like this, because it’s every guy who thinks about the future having their dreams come true. “I can talk to my favorite wrestler on Twitter. I can pay $175 to meet William Shatner. I can go to AVN in Vegas and pay $100 to my favorite adult star so I can hold her suggestively.”
Yeah, it’s cool to be able to do everything, but at what cost to you?
..and I don’t mean monetarily.
This filter ain’t free either. Well, some of them are, but most will cost you about .49 a photo online, which isn’t bad but it’s like 49 cents to take away your manhood and your building blocks of confidence.
The filter told me two things:
One - How much I love the song “Dilemma” by Nelly and Kelly Rowland, which I didn’t want to admit I loved in the early 2000s, because I was still a metalhead, but the music is catchy and contagious. The use of the song in the filter above just made me love it again.
Two - It also told me that I think this is a losing battle. Young men are pretty lost right now, where they can just fake being around girls without ever experiencing it in real life.
It’s like watching a movie and just FF’ing to the end to cut out all context and get to the conclusion. It’s like my cousins 25 years ago stealing accounts on Yahoo! Chess to push themselves to #1 in the world. Yeah, you can say you were a number 1 chess player, but did you actually earn it or was it stolen valor like “The Girlfriend Filter?”
As a middle-aged man, I feel so bad for these kids. They are beyond lost.
So, because I am a sucker and I had $2 in my pocket, I made a “Girlfriend Filter” for my father-in-law for his birthday because he likes to laugh at stuff, and that he did. That said, he’s a very unique, confident guy who wouldn’t need shit like that. Some of his friends would, but he is full of self-confidence and always likely had it from a lifetime of being social.
I won’t share that here, but it came out good.
So I said, “What the hell?”
I did it for me with my new obsession setting the backdrop: Doing yardwork!
This is the photo:
Here’s the video:
Only thing I could think of is… Why does my face look like that????
Everything but the smirk looks like me… also GET THE HELL OFF MY RECOVERING YARD WITH YOUR POINTY SHOES, WOMAN!
Man, I am getting old.
Anyway, Here’s 3 more of them in one video. It’s 21 seconds
One of me flexing in my gym clothes as I used to lift weights every day to fight depression. Got a buff white girl in Nike Spandex :)
Then a photo of me outside of the Bellagio balcony in Vegas where a row of AI Girls come to kiss me, and I turn into a moon-face Hispanic man. I don’t like the smile on me there.
Then finally, a 16 year old photo of me at Bank of America, when I tried to look good to attract customers and/or coworkers. Pretty dark time in my life, but I was handsome with hair, and seeing that video of me about to get kissed reminded me of my stupid mindset then. I was a barrel of problems, but picking up girls was never one of them. I just was not happy then.
Some funny outtakes though. This 2021 pic of me with my The Notorious Banker Food Drive with a crimson wearing hottie turned me into the whitest dude ever, resembling Mike Golic Jr, the sports talk host.
Then this one from 2017 when I was on performance enhancing drugs, lifting weights every day, writing a book about all the terrible stuff I’ve done, turning into this sad sack who was buff as hell still seeking affirmation from other people. This was a photo shoot. Check it out.
Then look at the video:
IT TURNED ME BLACK!!!
I TURNED INTO DAK PRESCOTT OF THE COWBOYS!!! HAHAHAHA!!!
The woman is gorgeous though!
BTW, I can’t believe it’s been a decade since I was steroid-infused James. Long, lonely time ago.
Most of those photos don’t really look like me—and I think I figured out why. AI works best when you’re relaxed, when your face is natural. But most of my photos were staged, performative, or coming from a place of insecurity. Acting like you are hard and all that.
The gym shot? It looked the most like me, because that version of me was doing the work. But it was still me trying to prove something to myself that I can be a gym bro and full of toxic male masculinity.
The Vegas pic? Everyone’s fronting in Vegas.
The bank photo? I cut a few seconds off because that smile was pure customer service. Fake. I looked cute and the girl was too, but it’s not real life
Even the yardwork one—she’s standing on my damn grass! I was having fun with it, but that face wasn’t “me” either. That was me playing around with something I’m still getting used to enjoying.
What AI showed me is that all these versions of myself were just slices—not lies, but not the whole truth either. The real me is somewhere in the middle: a guy with flaws, a writer working things out in public, and someone still trying to better himself.
That 2008 Hot Tub girl photo? I was not being anything I wasn’t. I was real, and people talked to real in a world where everyone is fake.
Yes, it’s human nature to want to feel attractive. I just spent too long pretending I was someone else to get there.
If I were a 20-something in 2025, I might actually be considered cool—because now I know how to read people. But these kids? They don’t explore themselves anymore. They don’t build anything inside. They just generate a photo and share it with their friends who are just as lost.
I’m joking around a lot, but I’m genuinely worried. If I had a daughter—or when my nieces grow up—what kind of dudes will be waiting for them? Ones raised by screens, driven by rage, and incapable of real connection?
People worry about AI taking over the world. I’m not one of them.
But I do think it’s accelerating something I noticed long ago:
The internet didn’t just soften men. It turned them into these moldable, lifeless lumps of clay. And it’s not just Gen Z—it’s my generation too.
I couldn’t have Prompted this shit.
Good luck to society, I guess. I spend all this time without AI boosting my confidence to tell myself that I am in love with the person I married, and I am constantly shooting for reality with her, because she is amazing and not an AI bot. :)
James B’s AI Girlfriend Power Rankings:
Gym Girl
Banker Girl
High Heels on the Sod
Food Drive White Girl
Dak Prescott’s Girl (She’s 🔥 tho)
James
Thanks for reading. If you haven’t unsubscribed yet, I will see you soon with more writing therapy! :)