Spells Gone Wild

Your fear of superhuman persuasion may have started in a nightclub

Girls Gone Wild ads were a fixture of late-night TV growing up in the ‘00s. The tapes offered compiled clips of spring breakers “going wild,” which mostly just meant removing their tops. The softest-core pornography imaginable somehow sold so well they could blanket cable TV with ads for years. Whatever sub-genre of it excited you—college girl, amateur, exhibitionism—there were better versions of it available everywhere. What exactly were people paying for?

Joe Francis, its creator, admits a big part of the product wasn’t the nudity. What they were actually selling was dialogue: magic sequences of words or conversation trees you could deploy to make regular, chaste, upstanding college girls “go wild” and remove their clothes in public. The tapes showed the entire process from first contact to payoff: approach, awkward banter, reluctance, wearing down of resolve. You may usually skip this part, but the tapes did not. Whether real or staged, paid or sincere, they were selling what looked to buyers like spells.

All men, deep down, are spell believers. At some point you see a guy with a woman way out of his league and you start an internal audit. It wasn’t his face or body or voice. He’s not rich and doesn’t seem powerful. By process of elimination, all that remains is text and its manner of delivery. Whatever he said must have been the deciding factor.

Something real is being overridden. From an evolutionary perspective, mate choice is the boss fight—the decision everything else in your life quietly serves. For most of history, women didn’t pick alone. Families, kin networks, and formal courtship practices did most of the screening. The practice of an individual woman selecting her own mate from a vast, anonymous pool of strangers is brand new, historically speaking, and only fully normalized in the last few generations. We took the most consequential decision and moved it from family negotiation to bars, dorms, and apps. In that environment, if a few sentences can tip the outcome, it feels more like sorcery than nice banter.

Men generalized from there. You’ve seen the posts. “There’s a sequence of keys you can press on your computer to make a billion dollars fall out. Your job is to find it.” It’s the same spell fantasy in business drag. Somewhere out there is a line of text that goes viral and lands you your dream job, or a series of commands that creates the next killer app, or a cold email that unlocks the perfect investor. You can object that this is hard in the same way saying LLMs “just predict the next word” conceals that doing this well is nearly impossible without an accurate world model. Raising the specter of difficulty says nothing about the existence of spells, only that they are hard to cast. This only deepens their mystique.

Then the machines arrive—systems that emit text at industrial scale on demand. The same substance you’ve come to believe can bed a partner out of your league, empty wallets, start cults, and elect presidents is now available as an API. It is natural to look at that setup and feel the floor tilt a little. If spells exist, what happens when machines get better at minting them?

Pickup artists weren’t controversial because they were ineffective. They were controversial because they were effective enough that it felt unfair. Someone had prerendered and then weaponized the last honest signal of real-time intellect: charisma. AI now looks, at first glance, like charisma with a compiler. “Superhuman persuasion” is the concern that spells will go exponential. The thing you once had to painstakingly craft in a nightclub can now be mechanically farmed from the ether to potentially create upheaval at civilizational scale.

We know spells exist from the mismatched relationships and improbable successes we see out in the real world, so where’s the fallacy? The hidden leap is this. If words can help with the single most tangled problem in your life—mating—then surely they can solve easier ones. If spells can bed a Victoria’s Secret model, surely they can talk a bank guard into opening a vault or a president into launching a nuke. Once you’ve watched text move the needle on something evolution has loaded with that much importance, every other system looks flimsy by comparison.

Somewhere along the line, you forget how you arrived at this heuristic and how strange the underlying environment is. The mating market is unusually spell-friendly. It is noisy, status-sensitive, alcohol-laden, and built on top of hardware evolution has already tuned for risk and experimentation. You are not conjuring desire from nowhere. People are genuinely unsure what they want, are highly responsive to social proof, and are surrounded by friends, music, and substances that all nudge judgment off center. In that environment, the right sentence need only tip a teetering stack.

Most of the rest of the world is not built like this. Bank vaults don’t open because you found the right vibe. Nuclear command chains are not structured like nightclub bathrooms. Corporate policy doesn’t flip because you negged the CFO. Even in advertising, where you would expect spells to reign, decades of research suggest most campaigns barely move the needle compared to price and distribution. There are occasional outlier phrases that matter a lot—a subject line that triples open rates, a scam email that fools an IT engineer—but they live under piles of friction and procedure.

The non-dating world is surprisingly spell-resistant. That doesn’t mean spells don’t exist outside mating or marketing. Cults recruit people, email tweaks multiply conversions, and social engineering defeats security systems. There are narrow, local spots where a sentence has outsize causal impact, and AI will absolutely help troll those niches more efficiently, but they are the exception rather than the default.

What it does mean is that the environments where spells thrive share specific traits: ambiguity, preloaded desire, rapid iteration, social distortion, and weak or outsourced guardrails. When those traits go away and you get bureaucracy, double-checks, logs, and accountability, spell power collapses. The sentence hits a wall of process and dies. Machines don’t erase that wall.

Our mistake is calibrating our fear of text on the newest, noisiest, weakest opponent we’ve ever put it up against—a historically novel dating system where we stripped away safeguards and then marveled that words could sometimes knock it over. From that vantage, AI-generated text looks like world-ending sorcery. From the vantage of older, thicker systems built to resist persuasion, it looks like what it actually is: a lot more spells colliding with a world that is, thankfully, harder to enchant.

Tomorrow, if spells can’t do everything, where do they evolve fastest and do the most damage?

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