“I let A.I. decide my morning routine — here’s how it’s going,” the influencer Grace Lemire tells the camera, yawning and stretching. She “desperately” needs a fresh morning routine “but didn’t have the brain power to plan it out.” She films herself inputting some parameters into the Anthropic chatbot Claude’s interface — she calls her version Claudia — and it spits back a schedule for her:
7 — wake up
7:15 — skincare & makeup
7:45 — breakfast
8:15 — meditation & quick win
8:25 — coffee & clean up
8:30 — work.
Lemire makes a montage of herself going through these motions, curling her hair, lighting a candle, eating French toast and grapes, unloading the dishwasher, placing a mug under her espresso machine. A week in, she says, she’s loving it. She’s thriving! Thank you, Claudia.
The morning-routine video is a classic genre of social media — a montage that’s part self-documentary and part self-help inspiration. It’s as though watching someone make her coffee, do her makeup or even just open her blinds in quick jump-cut succession is designed to make you feel as if you’re just a few steps away from a routine that will unlock everything.
Our curiosity about other people’s mornings long predated TikTok, of course. Benjamin Franklin published his daily schedule, in which he woke up at 5 a.m. and asked himself what good he could do that day. But modern self-help culture has fueled interest in other people’s routines. People want to know the secrets of chief executives and creative people they admire and want to emulate. Toni Morrison made coffee and watched the sunrise; Warren Buffett drinks Coca-Cola and stops at the McDonald’s drive-through; Jeff Bezos doesn’t look at his phone and spends his first hour “puttering.” In recent years, our voyeurism has trickled down to influencers and ordinary people leading ordinary lives: moms managing drop-off and work calls, office workers telling you how to squeeze in exercise.
More recently, the robots are getting involved, and they seem prepared with uniform suggestions. @UpgradingKatie, an influencer who focuses on integrating A.I. into her life, shows us what ChatGPT tells her to do each morning: Drink a “huge glass of warm water” and “10 minute zone cleaning” are among its instructions.
ChatGPT tells Kendall Sieber, who focuses on “gadgets and tech that actually make life easier,” to take her dog outside, then take her shoes off and let her bare feet touch the earth to calm her nervous system. “Make me the ultimate prework routine that I can do before my 9-to-5,” @alex.careerqueen says, which leads to a stretching regimen. The routines produced are often consistent: practical and health-conscious, but also strikingly simple in their suggestions of eating, getting dressed and heading to work. What else, really, would you do in the morning?
Despite their banality, these videos at least get something across that the A.I. companies want; some are now paying creators to make them. Notably, as far as my algorithm knows, they almost all feature women. This seems like a corrective: There has been a significant gender gap in A.I. use, and so far companies have seemingly catered to a Silicon Valley ethos that’s stereotypically for tech bros. They “vibecode,” letting Claude build websites or whole businesses on their behalf, and use A.I. to clean out their inboxes or build spreadsheets and budgets in seconds. But the morning-routine videos suggest that these tech tools have a place in the kitchen and the makeup cabinet. Want to have it all? Maybe you can, with help from Claude.
In one video sponsored by Anthropic, a woman wakes up in a white bed in a white room and fires up the chatbot for morning journal prompts. She makes avocado toast, which she eats at a white table decorated with white roses — Claude seems to love the color white — before putting on a white sweater and leaving the house. Earlier waves of morning-routine videos were filled with a plethora of products: matcha, Nespresso machines, moisturizer and makeups. These videos are comparatively sleek and empty — an indication that what’s valuable isn’t stuff anymore, so much as the time and attention you’re pouring into these interfaces.
On the other hand, the blandness certainly looks efficient. And only some users betray disappointment: After an influencer named Vi Luong goes through her own routine, she reacts to its basic clothing suggestions: “I don’t know why I was expecting it to be like a sister stylist.”
As large language models enter widespread use, everyone seems to be trying to figure out how to integrate them into their lives. These videos capture that bafflement; inadvertently, they are windows into the limits of what A.I. can do for you, as well as the limits of routine itself. As Luong admits, “I had this slay-ass morning routine and ended up having a bad day anyway.”
There’s a certain tension at play: We are willing to fork over our data, time and attention, ceding control to Claude so that we may feel a little more in control of our lives. But is that an illusion? After all, it doesn’t seem as though Claude has found some secret, unknown way of approaching a morning, some pocket of time that didn’t previously exist. Claude can tell you to meditate, but it can’t meditate for you. You still have to use your own brain for that.
Sophie Haigney is working on a book about our obsession with collecting objects, from priceless fossils to plastic Power Rangers.
