Grey Rocking is a widely recommended technique for dealing with manipulative or abusive people. The idea is to make yourself as boring and unresponsive as possible—like a “grey rock.” By giving short, flat, emotionless answers, you deny the manipulator the drama or energy they are trying to provoke. It can work as a short-term safety strategy, but it has drawbacks: it often feels like silencing yourself, shrinking your personality, and disconnecting from your authentic self. Over time, that can feel disempowering, especially for women who want to resist manipulation without losing their voice.

Diamond Shield is our alternative. Instead of going dull and invisible, Diamond Shield equips women with creative, confident comebacks that deflect manipulative power moves while also allowing them to “shine their light.” The shield is both protective and expressive: it teaches how to respond with clarity, wit, and resilience, so that you don’t back down, but also don’t get trapped in the manipulator’s game.

For this internship, students will take our existing pattern of manipulative maneuvers and comeback strategies and automate the production of these responses. The goal is to generate a large body of work that demonstrates how Diamond Shield can be applied across different scenarios, making the method teachable, scalable, and ready to integrate into our tools.

Our current ChatBoy app runs as a simple 2-D web quiz where users identify manipulative tactics. The long-term vision is to expand ChatBoy into a 3-D live simulation, where users practice real-time conversations with AI-driven bots that mimic manipulative personalities. In this setting, users will need to think on their feet, but with “training wheels”: suggested Diamond Shield comebacks they can try in the moment, before learning to generate their own.

Students will build the foundation for this upgrade by expanding our existing Diamond Shield pattern into a large, tagged library of responses. Using Python, they will automate the production of thousands of comebacks across manipulative scenarios. Each line will be tagged both by manipulation move and by flavor of response (e.g., witty, calm, direct, playful), creating a flexible dataset that can power both training wheels and free-play simulation modes.

Deliverables will include:

• A Python program that generates and tags Diamond Shield comebacks.
• A structured dataset of thousands of responses, aligned with specific manipulative maneuvers and response flavors.
• Documentation and schema for integration into ChatBoy’s future 3-D simulation environment.
• (Optional stretch goal) A prototype simulation script demonstrating how users could receive and test comeback suggestions in real time.

This work will transform ChatBoy from a static quiz into a dynamic practice arena, giving users the skills to respond to manipulation with creativity, confidence, and authenticity.