Upsetting Day: Dad's Revenge Stories🌭 (Patreon)

AI: an existential threat destined to rise up and kill us all by turning everyone into paperclips? Yes, say the AI people, who would very much like a "get out of all contracts free" card from the government. Yes, say the media outlets uncritically posting Elon Musk tweets as fact, given that they are now all owned by his fellow memelord billionaires. Me? I say that AI has already begun its dark work of thinning the herd. Those AI nostalgia videos, in which grinning homunculi beg the viewer to join them in the '80s? Subtle attempts at cultivating self-annihilation. Destroy your flesh being and live forever in the electronic afterlife of the racially pure American suburbs.

But AI's psychological warfare goes beyond footage of 2000s Wal-Marts and 1980s bedrooms full of consumer entertainment products. I believe that the forces controlling artificial intelligence are now deliberately stoking antagonisms between individuals, probing fault lines and searching for ways to set man against man. How else to explain Dad's Revenge Stories?

Don't you hate your fucking kids? They've been brainwashed to despise you by the liberal media and you can't beat them into compliance anymore because they're full-grown adults somehow. So now here you are, left alone to stew in your bitterness. Why not stoke those embers a little, friend? Why not vicariously explore what it might be like to get revenge on your greedy, backstabbing, woke progeny? Have a little hate-wank with help from Friend Computer.

Dad's Revenge Stories is a YouTube channel with 25,000 subscribers, which puts it at the level of a minor gaming video essayist or freshman racehate monger. The videos feature the AI-generated image of a man who looks like the elderly love child of Pierce Brosnan and the Most Interesting Man in the World. Each upload is clearly meant to be read as its own, self-contained story, but since they all have the same guy in the thumbnails, it gives the impression that this dude is really going through the proverbial wringer.

This imaginary silver fox's life is a living hell. He's abandoned in a foreign country by his wife and son, shoved into a blazing inferno, loses his legs in another fire, and gets told to eat in the kitchen after slaving away over a hot oven all day because he's old and gross. There are over 400 of these feature film-length videos and the channel only began posting earlier this year. Each one opens with the facsimile of a man recording a podcast, produced with whatever outdated model of generative AI Derek Savage is using to make Cool Cat Topia.

As a static image, this is haunting. In motion, it's obvious that this entity wearing the crudely-replicated face of a man is just mouthing syllables at random in blatant contempt of our divine language. The artifice of having him recording a podcast, too, adds a layer of confusion. Are we meant to think of this man as a character who's experienced the story of betrayal and revenge that he is about to relate on his fictional podcast?

No. We aren't meant to think at all. We are meant only to allow the images and sounds to wash over us, to imagine ourselves the victims of mortgage scams, money-grubbing daughters-in-law, and psychopathically evil sons. The target audience likely doesn't even mind that the model generating this stuff breaks down five seconds into the video, spitting subtitles that are sheer grating madness, a digitized fruit fly's frenzied attempts to grasp at meaning in its brief, sputtering life.

Anyway, this kind of thing must be expensive, because the majority of the two hour long video just looks like this: a JPG of a different man standing in front of a JPG of a backyard while barely-visible footage of a waterfall plays behind him. Why, DAD REVENGE STORIES? I can't help but feel that there's a sinister reason for this, like some A/B testing showed that the flicker of motion keeps old, crusty eyes focused on the screen, allowing it to work its spell more effectively.

Each story follows the same pattern. Old dad is taken advantage of, dismissed, spat upon by his children, wife, and/or in-laws. But then, he quietly turns the tables on his oppressors — typically by using his vast wealth and/or high-level connections. It's esprit d'escalier for viewers whose real-life witty retorts seldom reach the level of howling, incoherent syllables.

Sometimes the inciting incident involves dad trying to do something nice, his kind gesture being met with cartoonish ingratitude. Laugh while you can, ungrateful daughter. For soon, you will learn who I really am and what I am capable of. Then you will wish you had accepted my shitty ceramic hobo statue. But it will be gone, as will I, to our new life on a tropical island where people love and respect my ceramic work and say I'm the best at it.

Obviously elder abuse is a real thing that happens in our society. The elderly are taken advantage of, manipulated, and abandoned all the time. But that's not what these videos are about, nor is that group their target audience. Dad's Revenge Stories are the equivalent of an 8 year-old kid imagining leaving home and how sorry it'd make his parents that they didn't just let him have ice cream for dinner. Boo hoo, mom and dad! Boo hoo, my adult children!

Crucially, Dad's Revenge Stories nearly always turn on dad being an unfathomably rich guy and somehow having kept that from his family for his entire life. It's Secret Billionaire slop of the type that was once handcrafted and marketed to lonely, delulu women, now being mass-generated and delivered to the iPads of mentally subnormal senior citizens. I mean, at least The Beekeeper had some cool fight sequences and flammable honey.

This is boomer revenge fantasy stripped of any pretense of art or concession to narrative structure. It is the artificial voice of a digital Wormtongue whispering in the ears of your parents that they're right, inviting them to imagine a world where they had the power to put you in your place for politely asking that they don't call the waiter a racial slur behind his back. And while revenge is primarily a male-coded occupation, AI is canny enough to market these sorts of tales to women, too.

If you, like me, are someone who plies their trade in words, then you can look at all of this in a few different ways. One is to dismiss the possibility that any real human beings are actually watching this kind of thing. Indeed, nearly all of the comments on Dad's Revenge Stories appear to also be, mercifully, generated by machines.

It would be comfortable to live in that world. Easy. Too easy. Not for us is that world of ease and beauty.

Despair. Flesh and blood beings consume this content, letting the machine's crackling hatred course through them. Despair at the fact that the corrosive mindvomit of a sick algorithm which knows nothing but fury is apparently in hot demand. People can't get enough of the stuff. Remember how AI boosters were crowing about movies and stories individually tailored to their viewers? Some people really want that. If they could get YouTube to put their face on the body of a late-era Brosnan that kicks their spawn to the gutter for daring to be their own persons, that would be the ultimate.

But there's another way to look at it. To paraphrase Super Hans, people like a lot of stupid horseshit — Coldplay, the Nazis, etc. Go to any airport bookstore and check out what's on offer. Best case scenario you're finding a Michael Pollan book about taking mushrooms nestled beneath a pile of near-identical volumes called either "The Soldier Man's Honorbound Duty" or "F*ck Yeah! Girlbossing: Feministly Synergizing Stakeholder Values." Is it any surprise that Harry Potter for the gravebound has found a niche? You're a real man, Harold! Not like your shitty fucking pronoun kids! You brought them into this world, as the saying goes…

And Dad's Revenge Stories is not unique. There are dozens of channels just like it, each appealing to the secret desire deep within every parent to bury their children— I mean, to teach their children a moral lesson without the use of physical violence. Would "Calm Father Stories" lead you astray? I think not.

Dad's Sweet Revenge, meanwhile, features the world's greatest AI-generated Al Pacino/Andy Garcia impersonator.

Something about "DAD'S RAW REVENGE" feels unwholesome to me, though. We're a stray couple of letters away from dark romance here.

And hey, it's not just handsome old white guys who can get in on the sordid business of revenge — in today's postracial society, handsome old black guys can do it too!

Lastly, I like that Dad's Pure Revenge takes a different approach to most of these channels, presenting a less attractive, more working-class kind of AI-generated fella at the cost-cutting resolution of 360p. It looks like a cutscene for a $15 fishing game on the Wii called Old Pa's Countrytime Fishing: Vengeance.

These videos are a plague, one that will only get worse as the foundations of society continue to erode. Clueless boomers with no acquired immunity to internet lies will take them as fact, just as they have believed everything they've seen on Facebook and TikTok over the past decade. Did you know that Justin Trudeau is putting trans chemicals in the vaccine? Katy Perry is secretly one of them according to this diagram I saw of her facial planes.

So please, talk to your parents about AI-generated YouTube revenge stories. Maybe with some fire support, just in case. But most importantly,

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: John McCammon, who spent thirty years concealing unimaginable wealth from his family, just itching for one of them to disrespect him badly enough to trigger the reveal.

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