• I tested out the leading AI agents for a while, and gave them each the same tasks.
• OpenAI's Dot saved me from failing to file my taxes, but was the worst at ordering lunch.
• Ultimately, dealing with multiple AI agents at once is a hassle!

I've been playing around with various AI agents — Muse, Instinct, and OpenAI's Dot, and I've found them genuinely really useful for certain things.

But which one is best?

I put them to some, uh, semi-rigorous testing. Ok, not totally rigorous or controlled, but I gave them all the same 3 tasks — triage my email, order me lunch, and build me a personal website — and it was interesting to see which worked best. It was also interesting to see how differently they functioned at these tasks.

If you haven't started using an AI agent yet but are curious, well, I'm not sure that this is going to answer all your questions, but maybe is a place to get started.

A big spoiler here for my ultimate recommendation: right now, Meta's Muse is the only free one of the bunch, so in my mind, that wins for most normal people who just want to try an agent out. OpenAI's Dot is only for the $100/month plan (ouch!) and Instinct is currently invite-only.

To me, that's a no brainer. Do the free one (unless you're already paying for the ChatGPT plan, in which case you're probably already a pretty pro user and probably don't need my advice).

Challenge #1: Manage my email

I get a lot of email. Most of it I don't need to bother opening. Help me figure out which are the important ones.

Muse: Muse has been a dutiful soldier here, and this was pretty much the first task I gave it when I started using it a few weeks ago. So far, "triage my email" has been the one truly useful thing an agent has done for me.

Instinct: Overall, I don't like the fact that Instinct works mainly through your text messages vs. a dedicated app. While that's very convenient in certain ways, I don't like the idea of seeing email (bad, no fun) in my texts (good, fun) — mixing the two feels wrong.

However, I have to hand it to Instinct — it found a Paperless Post invite for a party that I would otherwise have completely missed in my personal email. It was the only agent to pull that one out for me.

Dot: Dot did something truly useful that required a lot of context, and it did all on its own. It noticed an older email exchange from last month with my tax accountant (I had filed for an extension, due in October). Dot noticed my accountant never confirmed he actually filed my taxes — yikes! This actually really saved me! (Don't worry, the taxes had indeed been filed.)

Finding an older — but important — email exchange that I hadn't closed the loop on is exactly what I want from an AI agent/assistant. I feel like 90% of things I'd rather do myself, but my human brain gets easily distracted and forgetful, and there are plenty of things I forget to deal with or get distracted.

Winner: Dot. Also me, for not going to jail for tax evasion.

Challenge #2: Order me lunch.

I asked each agent to order me a salad at a specific local restaurant. Because I didn't want to annoy real humans, I did the orders for pickup, to avoid any confusion or multiple separate deliveries.

This turned out to be a real fiasco, and I learned my lesson: it would have been infinitely easier for me to just do it myself.

Muse: Initially, Muse was very helpful. I accidentally gave it the wrong restaurant name, but Muse helped me find the right place and pulled up the correct menu options for me to see.

I had already connected my credit cards with Stripe, so I figured this would be easy. It offered up my debit card or another Mastercard, which I assumed was my regular credit card (I had just gotten a new card in the mail and didn't recognize the last four digits).

When I finally went to check my wallet, I discovered it was a mistake — it was actually the card connected to my health insurance-related HSA account, which is only approved for medical expenses.

By the time I straightened this mess out, I had already moved on to placing orders with Instinct and Dot. When I went to pick up my orders at the restaurant, there were only two bags with my name on them. Sure enough, I had gotten so distracted with the other orders that I never confirmed with Muse about placing the order, and it never sent through. (Can you see now what I was saying before about how I get distracted and don't finish tasks?)

Instinct: The most annoying part about Instinct, again, in my opinion is that it's over text messages. That means there were some quirks when I tried to text on my laptop — sometimes it failed to send as SMS. But after a few fails, Instinct was able to place the order relatively quickly. Well, sort of.

All told, this took 9 separate text messages on my end — not including Instinct's responses. It is hard for me to imagine that this was at all easier than just going onto the restaurant's website or UberEats and doing it myself.

Although the process was fairly painless, there was one thing I didn't like: it put the other through with no tip (!!!) and didn't ask me if I wanted to add one.

Dot: Somehow, this was the most difficult to get to work. It kept getting tripped up by the 6-digit code sext by text needed to login, but it kept failing (I had to get the code texted 3 separate times), and the browser it created for me to enter wouldn't let me type into it. A mess, basically, but finally it worked.

Winner: None. I feel very confident in saying that it would have been infinitely easier to just place the order myself through regular means. It's possible that it would be easier to order in the future, since I've already done the work of setting it up once. But I've learned my lesson.

Challenge #3: Build me a website

I have an old personal/professional website, but it's due for a refresh. I have terrible aesthetic sense and don't want to spend much time designing a site. Seems like a good job for AI to do for me!

Muse: I appreciated that, unlike Dot and Instinct, Muse didn't use the photo of my face from my byline photo (it seems very weird to have a giant photo of your own face on a professional website).

But all three basically did the same thing: pulled the info from my author bio on Business Insider, selected some recent articles as clips, pretty basic stuff.

Instinct: The design here was the most boring, and in a way I wouldn't even know how to make it look better (terrible aesthetic sense!). Weirdly, the selected article it pulled for me were random ones from over a year ago.

Dot: The look and design were probably the best here, and it pulled a decent mix of articles I'd want to showcase. But GOOD GRIEF the tagline here is so corny that I'm sort of embarrassed to even show you, even though I didn't write it myself:

Winner: Based on the mockups it made with design alone, I'd go with Dot. I think I could work with this. But all three of these made such cringey, cheesy copy about me that it honestly made me feel genuinely depressed. Is this who I am? Yuck!

Obviously, I'd have to rewrite all the copy myself, and pick the articles for clips — and at this point, is this even saving me any time beyond being a very generic template? Ah well.

Conclusion: The biggest challenge with all of them was figuring out what kind of task an agent is well-suited for.

Most of all, I found that trying to manage three different agents at the same time was a huge hassle. I want AI agents to be like a wife — making my life easier by anticipating my needs, not a husband who simply does chores when told. But this has backfired on me: now I have three wives, and they're all nagging me and I'm forgetting which is which. Ultimately, I don't recommend AI polygamy. May my experiment with it help you choose your bride.

• Hersheypark's "haunt sliders" — scare actors who slide on knee pads — have gained a fanbase on TikTok.
• "The makeup stays ON" commented one thirsty fan.
• The attention has translated to good business for the park, who has seen growing ticket sales for its Dark Nights event.

Imagine you're walking around an amusement park in October while it's Halloween themed. The air is crisp, you've got a giant pretzel, you're strolling with friends to get in line for the roller coaster. Out of the corner of your eye, you see tall man dressed in all black with skeletal face paint walking towards you.

Suddenly, he leaps to the ground on all fours, and against everything you've known in your life about how human beings ambulate, he slides across the pavement on his hands and knees, coasting right up beside you at an incredible speed.

Depending on who you are and your level of awareness of the "haunt sliders" of Hersheypark, this fast encounter leaves you either terrified or terrifyingly horny.

Since 2021, Hershey's amusement park has employed a group of haunt sliders from a crew that calls itself the "Decayed Brigade" for its Dark Nights Halloween event that runs in September and October.

Videos of Fryboy and his lookalike Archer, and others have racked up millions of views and created a dedicated fan base who travel from around the world just to see the creepy, sexy, slidey guys they saw on TikTok.

And their online popularity is good for Hershey's bottom line.

"The comment section [on TikTok] is a treasure trove of insight into their popularity. I mean, we have seen people saying, 'I am coming from Europe. I'm coming from Australia. I had no idea Hersheypark existed, but now, because this was served to me on TikTok, I'm aware,'" said Quinn Bryner, a spokesperson for Hersheypark.

"We have people who have bought our season passes because of it," she added. "So anecdotally, for sure, it has had a significant social commentary, which we think has also led to tickets."

Bryner cautioned they can't say that the haunt sliders popularity is the sole driver of the growth of the Halloween event, but that the Dark Nights has become a success and grown year over year in attendance and ticket sales. "We can confirm that the event's popularity in the past few years has allowed us to expand operating days throughout the fall, resulting in total Halloween attendance doubling the numbers achieved prior to 2021," she said.

For the last three years, Fryboy and some of the sliders do a meet-and-greet for the diehard fans after the performance on weekend nights. Fans wait up to an hour in line to meet them and take photos with the sliders (or purchase keychains or other photo prints from the professional photography service the park provides, which has taken over 4,000 photos for fans this fall so far).

The three sliders I interviewed — who asked not to publicize their full legal names because they are concerned about overzealous fans — have breached containment from something that happens inside the park gates to a full-blown social media phenomenon.

The sliders have anecdotally noticed the effects of TikTok on the crowds in the park. "This year especially, it feels like every other person's coming up saying they drove eight-plus hours to come see us or they just came for us," Fryboy said.

"We see them sit in our zone the whole night and it's pretty obvious that they just want to watch us," Valkyrie noticed.

Hersheypark is well aware of the Decayed Brigade's social media success, which is clear even on its own social channels. The most viewed videos on park's official TikTok channel were all of the sliders — even during the off-season.

Haunt sliding dates back decades

Haunt sliding has been a part of Knott's Scary Farm, the Halloween event at amusement park in southern California, for decades. A few of the performers working there figured out they could modify knee pads and gloves with metal pieces to allow them to slide up on guests as a novel way to scare them.

Sliding became a staple of Knott's Scary Farm, and the trend spread out around the country to various haunted theme parks and cornfields. It evolved into something more than just a scare tactic, with increasingly athletic stunts, choreography, and showcases during the off-season.

Although haunt sliding has become a haunted house mainstay, there is no group of performers who have attracted as much attention from people who never set foot in Hersheypark as the Decayed Brigade crew. This year, there are eight sliders, but Fryboy and Archer — both well over six feet tall, lanky, and with poufy dark hair — seem to have garnered the biggest online fandom.

When I spoke over a video call with Fryboy, Archer, and Valkerie, the current sole female performer in this year's crew, it was the hour before the park opened on a Friday night at 6 p.m., and they were in their full faces of makeup (they have a makeup artist on staff who does it for them), but not their performance clothes.

Fryboy, whose real first name is Carter, is not technically the leader or founder of Decayed Brigade, although he has become the most visible online and has been working at Hersheypark since Dark Nights started in 2021. He first saw sliders at Knott's Scary Farm when he was 13, and was inspired to start trying it out on his own at home. By 16, he got hired at a local haunted house in Florida, and eventually landed a job at Knott's in 2018.

"When sliding first started, it was mainly just a scare tactic and it wasn't really anything crazy, but once people started doing it more and more, a lot of the guys that started sliding at Knott's were stunt performers, so they would do little pre-shows before their stunt show was sliding," Fryboy explained. "They'd go out there and they'd do little rolls, and then they'd start jumping bodies, and then now they're jumping two, three, four bodies. So then tricks started getting added into it, and over time, a group was formed."

"I really think in this case, Carter took it upon himself to create his own iconic character in the social space and then share it amongst an audience that loves scare, but didn't have a way to maybe communicate and build on that," said Brewer Lister, managing director of immersive experiences at Hersheypark.

"He's built a following, and then he and his team have added to it by becoming more of a team in a group, especially Archer, the two of them," he added. "I think they tapped into a growth factor of what's taken place over the many years in social media in a particular realm, and it's worked."

Their fans are…thirsty

It is crucial to explain here that the internet viral around the Hersheypark haunt sliders is not just an appreciation of a good scare. It is extremely horny. The TikToks from fans are often set to suggestive music clips, and the comment sections are bawdy.

In one video from last fall of Fryboy and Archer standing together, set to the chorus of "Same Damn Time" by Future, comments say things like "Fryboy looks like he talks you thru it. Archer looks like he know how to do that thing your ex couldn't do." (18.3k likes) and "the makeup stays ON" (160.8k likes). In another video from this month of the two men, one commenter says, "Ok maybe my ex was right and i'm actually ill."

The allure of scare actors in face paint might not seem obvious. But hear these women out: They're tall, athletic, and mysterious. That's enough.

The thirst isn't limited just to the male sliders. On one video of Valkyrie walking through the park in slow motion, comments from women pour in: "Me and my husband aren't that serious." "I DIDN'T KNOW THIS WAS AN OPTION," and "i was already hooked but when she smiled i lost all control."

I asked Fryboy about getting that kind of attention.

"I think at the end of the day, we're just trying to perform and have a good time, and it's Halloween, we're dressing up as characters, so there's always going to be something along those lines, I think," he said. "But it's definitely not the end goal in any sort of way."

The sex appeal of the sliders seems to be an accidental collision with a current trend of "dark romance" and romantasy that's popular on Booktok. However, threading the needle of adding sex appeal into a haunted house seems fraught. SeaWorld Orlando's attempted a dark romance themed scare zone, but videos of bare-chested scare actors in masks (including at least one slider) awkwardly gesturing at guests went viral for being high on cringe and low on actual eroticism.

The difference with the Decayed Brigade is they claim they're not intending to be sexy.

"Halloween has always been the holiday for the weirdos, and we're the weirdos," said Fryboy. "We embrace it just as much as I'm sure everyone else wants to embrace it."