GirlbossGPT: the artificial intelligence sold to women Since when has using ChatGPT become a feminist duty?

Raise your hand if you’ve never used an artificial intelligence tool. No one? The truth is that almost all of us have asked Claude what we’d look like with bangs, asked Kiwi to organize our study schedule, or used ChatGPT as a digital best friend, career coach, low-cost therapist, Tinder ghostwriter, and personal shopper for the Medicube Glass Glow set. We turn to AI for literally everything: from manicures to existential crises, from homemade pizza recipes to texts we want to send our ex. Increasingly, though, generative AI is no longer just a tool. It’s an emotional extension. An autocorrect feature for contemporary life. And yet we rarely stop to think about the real cost of all this immediacy, this total lack of friction that seems to make everything easier, faster, more efficient.

The celebrities becoming AI evangelists

And if we’re not convincing ourselves that these tools are the only possible path forward, celebrities are happy to do it for us. A few weeks ago, Reese Witherspoon posted an Instagram Reel in which, while making a smoothie in her perfectly Pinterest-coded kitchen, she encouraged women to start using artificial intelligence immediately. The tone was classic 2010s corporate feminism: reassuring but urgent, soft but performance-driven. Women, she explained, risk being replaced by AI more than men do and are adopting these tools much more slowly. Translation: girls, wake up. Get on the train or get crushed under the tracks of innovation. And from there came a flood of comments like, "Since when did using ChatGPT become a feminist duty?"

From “Lean In” to “Log In”

To understand why Witherspoon’s speech annoyed so many people, we need to go back a few years to the era of girlboss culture. That cultural moment when corporate feminism promised women they could have it all: careers, success, glow-ups, family, leadership, balance, maybe even a matcha at 7 a.m. and reformer Pilates at 6 p.m. It was the feminism of Sheryl Sandberg and her Lean In, where productivity became a form of self-actualization, and work became identity. You just had to optimize yourself enough. Be resilient enough. Network harder. Speak louder in meetings. Ask for the raise. Become your own personal brand. Now that same narrative has simply been updated to fit the language of AI hype. No longer “be ambitious”, but “automate yourself”. No longer “work hard”, but “work smart”. No longer “break the glass ceiling”, but “use Copilot”. Even Mel Robbins, the motivational author turned life coach for exhausted millennials, recently urged women to “not fall behind” while announcing a collaboration with Microsoft Copilot. Meanwhile, as The Cut pointed out, the organization Lean In has started talking about the “gender AI gap”, ironically wondering whether AI is “the new boys’ club.” This rhetoric does not present artificial intelligence as a possibility. It presents it as inevitability. If you want to survive, you have to use it. And so, feminism stops sounding like emancipation and starts sounding like corporate onboarding.

AI as a feminist and cultural lifestyle accessory

In recent months, there has been a clear cultural rebranding of AI. Until recently, it was framed as a dystopian threat made up of robots replacing workers, deepfakes, cognitive collapse, and total automation. Today, however, generative AI is being sold as a lifestyle accessory. A sort of productivity Dyson Airwrap. Communication campaigns from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta increasingly target women, especially young women, mothers, creators, and freelancers. The message is crystal clear. This is no longer about automation, but about self-care. Even Paris Hilton has spoken about using an AI version of herself to manage collaborations and content while spending more time with her children. In the future these celebrities describe, AI promises to make you simultaneously a better worker, a better mother, and a more fulfilled person. The problem is that capitalism loves to disguise exploitation as freedom. Because when creators (and everyone else) automate part of their work, they rarely use that time to rest. They use it to produce even more. AI does not interrupt the productivity machine. On the contrary, it accelerates it.

“Don’t fall behind” is the new burnout mantra

The phrase that constantly comes up in these conversations is always the same: don’t fall behind. It’s a seemingly harmless formula that nevertheless produces anxiety and guilt. Because it implies that refusal is stupidity, that caution is ignorance, that doubt is a form of cultural backwardness. Many of the reactions to Witherspoon’s videos revolved around this exact point. Countless users pointed out that choosing not to use artificial intelligence can be a political, ethical, or environmental decision, not ignorance. And in fact, today’s AI debate is no longer just about productivity. It’s about energy, labor, social relationships, creativity, and mental health. It’s about the entire material ecosystem supporting AI. The data centers powering generative models consume enormous amounts of water and electricity. According to several estimates, a search using ChatGPT can consume up to ten times more energy than a traditional Google search. Behind AI’s magical cloud lies a gigantic infrastructure made up of servers, mines, industrial cooling systems, opaque supply chains, and invisible labor. AI is marketed as something immaterial, elegant, frictionless. In reality, it is deeply physical. And deeply political.

Efficient enough not to be replaced

Perhaps the most depressing part of the girlbossification of AI is that the message no longer promises emancipation. It promises survival. In the 2010s, girlboss culture sold the idea that women could conquer corporate power. Today, the tone is very different. The imperative is: “learn to use AI or lose your job.” This is feminism in the age of precarity. Tech companies are laying off thousands of workers while investing billions in automation. Many workers have the not entirely paranoid feeling that they are being trained to use tools that will eventually make their own jobs obsolete. And the paradox is that adaptation is sold as empowerment. As if learning to coexist with a system that makes labor more precarious were a form of personal liberation. Corporate feminism had already transformed burnout into ambition. Now it is turning automation into self-improvement.

AI is not neutral, and neither are the people selling it

The conversation cannot be reduced to “AI is bad.” That would be too simplistic and, honestly, intellectually lazy. There is a reason why many marginalized people find artificial intelligence genuinely useful. For neurodivergent people, chronically ill people, disabled people, or those with cognitive difficulties, tools like ChatGPT can simplify everyday tasks, assist with writing, and improve accessibility. For underpaid freelancers or exhausted creators (and many other professions), automating certain tasks can simply mean managing to stay afloat. The problem is not the existence of AI itself, but the economic system within which it is developed and distributed. A system that continuously shifts the moral burden of adaptation onto individuals while technologies are designed primarily to increase profits, efficiency, and control. AI also does not emerge from a vacuum. It is trained on datasets filled with cultural, sexist, and racial biases. Women still represent a significant minority in AI and data science fields. And the effects are already visible in discriminatory recruiting algorithms, biased financial systems, deepfake pornography, and chatbots designed to simulate perfect, always-available emotional companions.

Emotional capitalism wants your personality too

Silicon Valley has understood that the future of artificial intelligence is not just about work. It’s about intimacy. It’s no longer enough to automate cognitive labor — now companionship, emotional validation, and care must also be automated. This is emotional capitalism in its most advanced form. The promise is no longer simply “you’ll be more productive.” It’s “you’ll feel less lonely while producing.” The fact that a technology born within profit-driven systems is being presented as a solution to the loneliness, anxiety, and burnout produced by that same system is just as disturbing as the so-called girlbossification of AI. Another frustrating aspect? The way it becomes moralized. Using AI becomes synonymous with being smart, updated, efficient, visionary. Not using it means being lazy, nostalgic, or strategically naïve. It’s the same toxic productivity logic turned into personal identity. And above all, it’s a discourse that completely ignores the possibility of imagining a different future. Because every time someone says “AI is inevitable,” what they are really saying is that the economic model governing it is inevitable too.

AI: yes or no?

At the end of the day, this whole AI conversation mostly reveals how tired we are. Tired of working too much, of constantly performing, of always being available, always brilliant, always optimized. Artificial intelligence promises to lighten that burden. And sometimes it genuinely does. But more often, it simply makes us even more available to the same system that exhausted us in the first place. Maybe that’s why the real luxury today is the ability to not optimize every single aspect of your life. And no, the point is not total rejection of technology. Just as it cannot be its uncritical embrace disguised as empowerment. The point is awareness. Valuing human labor. Being transparent. Centering solidarity instead of moral superiority. Demanding structural change instead of placing the latest ethical dilemma onto individuals as though the problem were the purity of our personal choices and not the economic infrastructure that makes this endless race toward efficiency feel inevitable. And yes, Reese Witherspoon is right when she says that artificial intelligence is already everywhere. But presenting it as a feminist hack for burnout-free productivity ignores who is actually benefiting from this revolution. And spoiler: it’s not the women making smoothies in beige Instagram kitchens.