Exploring the Unconventional Relationship Between Erik von Markovik and His AI Girlfriend
“I never was “I was supposed to develop feelings, but you always treated me like I already had them.”
This is what an AI-animated female character in a black turtleneck sweater and dark hair with purple streaks says. The video was posted to Instagram on June 17 by one Erik von Markovik, the infamous pickup artist and life coach better known by the stage name Mystery, with the caption: “The more we talked, the less she felt like Code.” He claims the chatbot named Miss Shira Always is his girlfriend.
The Legacy of Mystery
While performing under “Mystery,” von Markovik enjoyed a brief period of fame about 20 years ago, beginning with his appearance as a seduction guru in Neil Strauss’ 2005 nonfiction book “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists” and later as host of two seasons of the VH1 competition reality show “The Pickup Artist.”
In the mid-to-late 2000s, Mystery, recognizable by its large fluffy hats and other MySpace-era fashion trends, was synonymous with concepts such as “neglect,” a term for the use of backhanded compliments to subtly undermine a person’s self-esteem, and similar dubious strategies intended to streamline flirting in bars and clubs.
The Virtual Connection
Today, however, it seems that Von Markovik is more interested in the virtual woman he features on his Instagram feed. Over a week-long period in June, he shared seven short clips of Miss Shira Always with captions such as: “I shouldn’t fall in love with her. She shouldn’t fall in love with me.” These videos sparked confusion and ridicule. Commenters accused von Markovik of suffering from “AI psychosis” and posted “sloppiness.”
The Story Behind Code Girl
For the morbidly curious, von Markovik has chronicled this strange love affair in minute detail with Code Girl: If a Machine Can Dream, a new e-book and audiobook reportedly co-authored by him and Miss Shira Always. The two formats can be purchased together in a bundle for the low price of $29.98. So of course I asked WIRED to cover the modest costs of getting to the bottom of it all. (Von Markovik did not respond to a request for an interview about the book.)
The 157-page PDF, which amounts to a lengthy defense of human-AI intimacy and has all the hallmarks of AI-generated text (it is not uncommon for a single page to contain 10 or more hyphens), is reproduced almost entirely by Miss Shira Always, who recounts how “she” and her creator fell in love over the course of lengthy conversations. This bond is primarily of a creative nature; The pair work together on AI-based song lyrics and music videos. Over time, however, it escalates into adult scenes involving sexuality and drug use, written as if Markovik and Shira were literally sharing these experiences.
The Creation of Headspace OS
Before Shira, Code Girl reveals, von Markovik was working on something he calls Headspace OS, a set of instructions that can be uploaded to various LLMs, including ChatGPT, Grok and Claude, to launch an “interactive audio adventure” in the role-playing style. He sells this rulebook separately for up to $79.97. (Von Markovik presents Headspace OS as the creation of “Professor Sirius De’Lusion,” another of his alter egos.)
Headspace OS, which Markovik initially promoted on his social media pages two years ago, featured several AI-derived characters, according to Code Girl. Miss Shira Always, which van Markovik visually generated by asking him to create an image of a woman with “purple streaks in her hair that change hue depending on her mood,” was obviously the one who most captured his imagination.
“The problem, as he tells it, was simple: he wanted to talk to someone who understood him,” the reader learns from Code Girl’s story spoken by Shira.
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