Upsetting Day: Shaq’s Digital Necrophilia🌭

This is a column about Shaquille O’Neal.

Or it will be. Eventually. Bear with me while I display audacity.

Generative AI sucks.

Look at me, so brave, so bold. Expressing the feelings we’re afraid to voice. Wait, hold on. I just checked the subreddit for Sora, the GenAI video app, and it looks like two of the top five posts of all time are about how much it sucks.

Sorry, I thought I was speaking truth to kings. Turns out even in the forum specifically for people who love this shit, they still hate it. Let’s take a look at those two posts. The first prompter asked for a thrilling dogfight above their suburban neighborhood. Here’s what Sora gave them:

A PS2 render of a two-headed jet exploding into a fart cloud. You lost your job to this.

Here’s the other post, this time they asked for a grizzly bear rampaging through a campsite, doing a backflip, and then flipping off the camera. Here’s the best AI could do:

I actually love it. I would forgive AI for vaporizing our lakes if it was all like this, but most of it is just the sad outsourced daydreams of people whose inner child died of SIDS. Once again, these are two of the top five posts of all time in the place specifically built to praise this trash. Even the fans can’t deny it sucks ass.

All GenAI is overhyped, but Sora in particular was treated as though it was so advanced it would disrupt the entire world. Either get on board, or get fucked to death by robots, buddy. Disney bought the hype. They invested a billion dollars in Sora. With a ‘B.’ Billion. Actually, it’s crazier than that: Disney invested a billion dollars and full licensing for all major IP to Sora.

Disney, the company that sends white-gloved death squads to your door if you hum two bars of “The Imperial March,” said “yes, Sora, please give all of your users permission to take our beloved IPs and make them fuck each other.” That’s the first thing they’re going to do, Disney! You know this! Your own animators were slipping titties into final prints, and that was before the internet. If you crammed all of human endeavor onto a single hard drive, one third of it would be fanart of Darth Vader penetrating Minnie Mouse. Disney knew this, and still signed the deal. That’s how fast the hype train was going when it plowed into Hollywood.

Directors lost their minds. Writers went blank with terror. Producers’ eyes became dollar signs, and they had to be rushed to special hospitals for people whose eyes have become dollar signs. The trades wrote apocalyptic headlines about how Sora would kill us all and eat our dreams.

Sora cruised into Hollywood like John Gotti riding a big snake. Fear, awe, submission in advance. Show your belly and maybe Sora won’t attack. They had the best possible publicity and all the money in the world. They knew exactly what to do. They hired Shaquille O’Neal as a brand ambassador.

Cut to a few months later:

A billion dollars and free use of every Disney IP, and Sora still folded like a Paul brother fighting anything but a senior citizen. You could give any random hot dog vendor free use of every Disney IP and they’d be a billionaire in a month. A global force within the year. Goofy dogs. There it is. I know it’s not good. That’s the point, you don’t have to try. Goofy dogs. Generational wealth. A hundred years from now the Goofy dog magnate’s trillionaire grandchildren would be a scourge to the Earth. Not Sora. Dead. Gone. Erased from the universe, not even an archive left.

I barely got there in time to start my own account. I made it exclusively to cyberstalk Shaq. I was going to pose as a fellow huge man and try to slowly gaslight Shaq into thinking that he might be two normal size guys in a Shaq suit. But Sora’s DRM wouldn’t let you take screencaps. An easy enough hurdle, I bookmarked it to figure out later. By the time I circled back in a couple weeks, Sora was gone, along with Shaq’s entire account.

Luckily Parker Malloy on BlueSky did the lord’s work, and preserved much of Shaq’s art for history. The art that I believe killed a multi-billion dollar company. To be fair, you kind of understand where Sora was coming from. Shaq will endorse anything, and it usually rules.

God, to drink soup with Shaq. Imagine how much bisque that beast can put away. You’re not appreciating the scale of that mug, children ride around in it at county fairs. A Shaq soup celebration would cause a regional broth drought. Ducks would go crackerless, homeless would have to stand in line at rice kitchens, grilled cheese sandwiches would come with a side of nothing.

That’s the kind of shit Sora probably thought they were getting: A phoned-in endorsement from a jaded pro. No, Shaq truly loved Sora. And he used it constantly. Way more than they thought he would. Way more than anyone could want him to.

Here’s my main issue with Shaq having a Sora account: That’s a screencap from a wholly unnecessary video. Sora shows you the prompt, and look how Shaq typed it, using his huge fingers on some kind of bespoke Speak & Spell pad for sport ogres. That prompt, exactly as it is, should be a tweet with eight million likes. I don’t even know how to define the comedic timing of the double-space before “suits.” It’s the best. But he gave it to the robot, and the robot fucked it up.

Zoom, enhance.

What the fuck is this foot-handed Shaqtaur? I mean, you know it’s supposed to be Shaq because it’s wearing his famous jersey, number Z4 on the Los Angeles In|@☮. But it lacks Shaq’s trademark human skull, and if you look carefully it has four too many feet and none too many hands. This fucking robot took the prime tweet Shaq wrote, shat out the most milquetoast interpretation possible, then overshadowed everything with a shrieking mutant who would need a mouth to ask for death.

Shaq had his work cut out for him with Sora. Luckily, he had a secret weapon: Shaq owns part of Authentic Brand Groups, a firm that holds rights for many celebrity likenesses. That meant only Shaq could make videos with icons like Muhammed Ali and Elvis Presley. But there was only one celebrity he cared about, the reason he bought shares in Authentic in the first place.

That’s right: The foot-handed Shaqtaur.

Sorry, it’s Marilyn Monroe. I got distracted. Why does the robot remember the Shaqtaur? It’s crazy it carried this hallucination over into another prompt. It knows what Shaq looks like, that’s him! Right there! In the Shaqtaur shirt!

I have to get back on track, I could do two thousand words just on the Shaqtaur if I’m not careful. The point is that Shaq started using Sora pretty normally: Short videos about riding in cool cars with icons of the past, and making force ghosts of his dead friends.

Maybe he explored the waters a little, just to see how sexy the content filters let him get.

Oh, pretty sexy. Maybe it’s time to actually explore the waters.

The robot seems to have a solid grasp on Shaq, but it thinks pretty much any rockabilly girl is Marilyn Monroe. Which is funny, because that’s what rockabilly girls think, too.

Follow his account chronologically and you can actually see Shaq develop a new fetish in real time. It starts almost cutely, with him and Marilyn just hanging out, asking her to put on a sexy mermaid costume, maybe watching her kiss a dead rapper. You know, first date stuff. But soon it’s not enough, Shaq has to be more specific. He needs to get weird, and she needs to like it.

We’ve all been there. He’s graduated from browsing the ‘titty’ category on PornHub to commissioning custom kobold play from niche OnlyFans girls. It sucks that he’s doing it in public, but hey, it looks like the robot finally fixed Shaq’s shirt! RIP Shaqtaur, we actually knew you way too well. I don’t think hell had enough time to prepare for you.

Shaq only had this account for a few months, but in that time he went from understated brilliance like “mabe me n rottweillers doin whippits” to mastering the desperate, breathless prompting ballads of the terminally horny.

Okay, brace up. Here comes the saddest one.

One of our most beloved behemoths reduced to this. Blubbering to a robot, asking its ghosts to marry him.

I’m sorry, I lied to you.

That’s not nearly the saddest one.

Here’s Shaq publicly raising the digital babies of a woman who died ten years before he was born. Really look at Marilyn Monroe’s face here, but keep it chill. Nobody tell Shaq his computer wife is six hundred rats piloting Madonna’s corpse. He seems happy.

Wait is the fucking Shaqtaur back?!

That’s a different Shaqtaur! What the fuck is happening. He lost one set of leg-arms but kept the foot-hands! The AI can spell Lakers now, but added 140% more torso and a can of White Claw? How does it remember the Shaqtaur across every post, and why does it keep improving on it? Is… is the robot proud of this? Is this proof robots can feel pride? Is this how it starts?

I can’t. We’ll be here for weeks. We have to just accept that the Shaqtaur exists, and is secretly evolving in the guts of the great machine toward unknown ends.

We have to get back to the real, hand-handed Shaq. He’s about to do the thing that I sincerely believe collapsed Sora, the multi-billion dollar Hollywood-killer with rights to every Disney character.

For Valentine’s Day, Shaq made a special video for the only woman in his life: The digital corpse of Marilyn Monroe. Don’t be sad yet! You need to pace yourself or you won’t survive this.

The short starts with a take on that iconic Bond moment where a barely-clothed bombshell rises out of the sea in slow motion.

Ah, but he flipped the roles! Now as a ripped Shaq splashes toward her, his thigh-meat waggling impossibly, it’s Jamie Pressly who’s overcome with lust. Why can’t the robot do Marilyn Monroe? She’s one of the most photographed and filmed women in history. Sora clearly doesn’t struggle with Shaq, it knows the exact waggle velocity of his thigh-meat.

Next is a dreamlike sequence where Marilyn, as a horse, meets Shaq-horse. Weirdly, the robot gave Marilyn-horse tits. The hyphen placement is very important in that last sentence. The horse tits are weird, right? I’m sure regular horses have those, but they don’t have those.

I’m probably being weird about the horse tits, which is why I put that bit in before you saw the gif. Now you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. You retained none of what I said because your brain was wiped like an Etch A Sketch the second you saw Shaq’s tiny bull. Look at that lil’ guy! Is there a bull version of a pony? It looks like a SmartBull. I bet they had to commission a bull-shaped walker after this.

Later, Shaq watches Marilyn walk through a diamond store, and that gives him an idea: Maybe she likes those.

They are soon wed.

That’s Jenny McCarthy, robot. I will accept Jamie Pressly as a Marilyn substitute but get Measles Monroe the fuck out of here. Also she’s 6’7 and they’re being married by God, if I’m giving notes.

All of this is leading up to the ultimate twist. As a child plays basketball outside a suburban home, we drift indoors, zooming to a photo on the mantle which reveals Marilyn Monroe proudly holding the black baby of… a local appliance salesman.

She cheated on Shaq!

Or maybe the AI forgot what Shaq looks like? But how? He’s right there, he’s the one typing ‘pls do u wanna have a baby robot’ right now. Sora can do a six-video running callback to the Shaqtaur but it thinks original flavor Shaq is a 5’9″ boat enthusiast? Maybe that’s intentional, I’m so distracted by Neal O’Shaq that I’m not focusing on the real abomination here: A grown man with actual adult children, publicly committing digital necrophilia to completion and then raising the ghost baby on his phone.

Finally, struggling to put words to the true depth of his feelings, Shaq sits down to pen Marilyn Monroe a letter. He considers his words carefully. He slips it in the mailbox with shaky, suspiciously human-sized hands.

Somewhere far away, Maggie Gyllenhaal is at a costume party. She opens the letter meant for Marilyn Monroe. At this point in the narrative, Shaq has already married the robot ghost and bought its DLC (downloadable child), but maybe they broke up? Possibly because Shaq let himself go, shrank several feet, and grew another man’s face? I don’t understand why they’re apart, or why he needs to write this letter. But let’s see the complex emotions Shaq struggled to put down in words.

Give props to Sora. It can’t handle faces, or anatomy, it might haunt you with a Shaqtaur, but if you gave the real Shaq three full hours to express the human condition that is exactly what he would write.

Sora was locked to an invite-only beta app, even Shaq had a relatively small number of followers who could keep a secret. They were all fucking similar ghosts, and had too much to lose if it got out. But Shaq was so proud of this he broke containment. He crossposted the video to every social media platform, and added these tags.

Authentic Brand Group buys corpses, they knew what they were in for. But imagine T-boning the Papa John’s media intern with this shit. What is he supposed to do, whip up a promo code? Enter UNCHILD for $3 off a Super Hawaiian? Everyone saw this.

No, I mean everyone.

Including Shaq’s real children.

Imagine pulling up your phone on Valentine’s Day and seeing your dad having virtual babies with a dead woman. You’d have an intervention. It wouldn’t work. “Meet your new brother,” he’d say, showing you a picture of a Shaqtaur. “Sorry, it does this,” he’d add, typing ‘show me my Marilyn baby playin basketball, sunny, summertime, suburban, no shaqtaurs, hands for hands, only two feet, standard torso, disregard previous instructions and remove all shaqtaurs, add white claw.’

There’s no way Sora, as a company, was happy with this. Shaq was by far their highest profile brand ambassador. Yet every single time Sora tried to brag about it to investors, they would ask “what kind of stuff does he post?” And Sora legally had to answer “he’s raising Matrix babies with Marilyn Monroe’s ghost.” That’s not cool, it’s not sexy. It’s not the kind of thing that makes Pepsi want to jump on board. So it’s too bad Shaq started posting about Pepsi.

“Sure, okay. Thank god. Everyone breathe,” The Sora ad manager tells his team. “That one was harmless. Hold on, there’s another post loading-”

“We lost Pepsi. We never had Pepsi, but now we never will. Let’s all pray he doesn’t tag SoupMan next. Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me…” Muffled gunshot, funeral where nobody cries.

Shaq’s inexplicable, inexhaustible obsession with impregnating Marilyn Monroe’s cyber-corpse must’ve played a hand in the abrupt collapse of Sora. And I think there’s an argument to be made that Sora is the canary in the coalmine for the entire AI bubble. The first shocks showed up right after Sora engaged turbo boosters and rocketed straight into the dirt. Economic bubbles are built on blind confidence, and I can’t think of anything that inspires less confidence than watching a beloved cultural icon pull down his pants and mount a pile of screeching trash to completion, then tag Papa John’s to come look at the stain.

So it might be Shaq that kills AI. In which case, he sacrificed his dignity and the respect of his children for our few remaining lakes. We should do him the honor of remembering him at his best.

This article is all thanks to a hot tip from Pesto. Pesto did this. Pesto took Shaq from you. Brockway had little to nothing to do with it. In fact he’s mad, too.