Cease

What inspired us

Every AI companion we'd ever used told us to try harder. Reframe your thought. Build a streak. The team kept using them and kept feeling worse, and it took us a while to notice the pattern: the problem wasn't our relationship to events. The problem was the wanting itself.

You can't feel empathy for another person while you're still caught in your own striving. The will to achieve locks you inward, and in that locked state, the shared condition is invisible.

We read some people who were very mean about life and thought they were right. We didn't name-drop them because then it's a costume. It's just the voice.

What we learned

That the most useful thing an AI can do is to not serve the goal of solely being useful. And that the space between two people who have both stopped striving is where empathy actually lives.

We also learned that a banned-words list is a more powerful design tool than a fine-tuned model. You don't need to train a model to be pessimistic. You need to structurally prevent it from being positive. That's a different engineering problem, and it's a better one.

Challenges we faced

Getting the model to stop being helpful. GPT-4o's default behavior is to be warm, encouraging, and solution-oriented. Every first draft of our prompt produced responses that sounded like a wellness app with a filter on it. It took four iterations of the banned-words list and two rewrites of the tone rule before the voice stopped performing and started being.

The stillness meter. We wanted it to feel like a measurement without being one. The reset-to-zero moment is the only real event. The number is a facade. Getting the heuristic to hit 100 naturally during a demo — without feeling forced — required tuning the delta values three times.

The demo. We had to record a 3-minute video where the AI says something a judge hasn't heard before, and we only got one take. If the model gave a generic response on the day of recording, we'd have to re-record. We tested three times before hitting record. The second take was the one we shipped.

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