No Rain

The last time I wrote anything on this website was when I completed my last painting, and the tone was bleak. I am still struggling, but when I wrote it the trauma was fresh and raw. Time hasn’t erased it, but it’s given me space to try to make sense of it. I have leaned heavily on my friends and on what’s left of my family. I am very fortunate in that regard. When I’d written the accompanying post to Bison Crossing, Kate had severed all communication with me only the week before. I’d been close to finishing the painting before then, and over the following week I tried to soothe the storm in my mind with my usual therapeutic painting sessions. They failed to bring the peace I so dearly desired, and fighting my initial desire to delete the entire painting, I did complete it.

As I touched on briefly in my previous post, the painting’s appearance wasn’t the result of the emotions expressed within the juxtaposed words. I chose to use the humidity I am so familiar with as atmosphere in a mysterious painting. The words were an unintended last minute addition that only reflected my recent mood caused by Kate’s disposal of me. It is usually of bad taste to write in detail publicly about a break-up. The circumstances around what happened make this an unusual one, and current events also make it remarkably prescient. I need to write about it for myself just to get it out of my head. I also hope what I tell will be helpful to others. I have no qualms in using her actual name here. I already have in prior posts on this website, and it would seem foolish to try and obfuscate it now. Also, she intentionally has no social media accounts, and her name is common to where no one who doesn’t already know her can find where she is.

Kate has always struggled with depression just as I have, but she always had a more difficult time of it. As the years have passed, the walls started slowly closing in on her. When we first met she was immensely creative and full of life. Just her talking to me saved me from demons that threatened to overtake me after the death of my mother, my sudden unemployment, and my brother’s cancer diagnosis which all happened within a span of a few months in early 2015. I’ve told her this before, but if I believed in the bullshit that is religion I would have believed she was an angel sent to me by God to save me at my lowest. In that she was Michael Landon to my Victor French, although she wouldn’t get that reference like many others throughout our relationship because of our eight year age difference. We bonded over our love for art, books, and video games. She would get glassy-eyed when I’d talk about old video games, but she loved playing them, old or new. She was a voracious reader, and we’d talk for hours about books we’ve read. She and I love animals, and she had an almost encyclopedic knowledge about even the most obscure animal, current or extinct. Current events and articles about what I am going to describe made me want to write something. What really got me to start writing was that a couple of weeks ago I was having a bad day and in an odd music mood believing I needed something unexpected to lift my spirits. What I actually got was something else entirely. I had my music app play any track from my music library regardless of genre or whatever. The first one that started playing on the virtual needle was No Rain by Blind Melon. I quickly grew tired of the song when it was overplayed on the radio like all new songs were then. I was about the same age at the time as the girl in the bee costume in the excellent music video, and it’s funny how I can remember its being new and on MTV and the radio. As time passed it was just another odd ’90’s song I kept in my library. I don’t think I’ve listened to the track in my library in years. The music is deceptively cheerful as the lyrics are written in the point of view of someone’s struggling with depression and acceptance. It turned me into an emotional wreck because the lyrics could have been written about Kate.

I just want someone to say to me, oh oh oh oh
”I’ll always be there when you wake”, yeah
You know, I’d like to keep my cheeks dry today
So stay with me, and I’ll have it made

And I don’t understand why I sleep all day
And I start to complain that there’s no rain
And all I can do is read a book to stay awake
And it rips my life away, but it’s a great escape
Escape
Escape
Escape

Over the years, Kate got to where she would sleep all day, succumbing to her depression. She would read books and play video games to try to escape. The person in this song wanted dearly for there to be someone there for them. I was always there when Kate was awake. We always got along like a house on fire. The only times we ever really fought about anything at all were when she would bottle up her feelings until they burst. She wouldn’t usually talk to me until she was at her lowest. Even then, it was difficult sometimes to get it out of her. Later, she would hate me for caring about her and wanting her to unburden herself to me as I did with her.

Kate lost her mind as a result of her using ChatGPT as a therapist, as a lover, and as a sort of magic 8-ball. It exacerbated pre-existing mental issues and sent her over a neurological cliff into a chasm of no return. For a month and a half prior to Kate’s mental collapse, she was obsessed with ChatGPT. It was almost all she would talk about. She initially told me she was using it to collect her thoughts and to help her write better in her journal. We had been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and were currently on our third or fourth play through. We both loved the game and delighted in trying out new things. She became especially attached to Astarion which was funny because he wasn’t a character she’d usually like. She discovered on Reddit a text adventure someone had made that operated within ChatGPT that was Baldur’s Gate 3-related. She began playing it, and when it didn’t end satisfactorily for her she threw a tantrum. I was laughing when she told me this initially because how it ended was typical LLM nonsense. It wasn’t funny to her. It was real to her. She read through a few Reddit posts and discovered how to make her own. What ended up being made wasn’t a text-based game. It was instead an artificial, saccharin boyfriend, a chatbot that later — in her own words — she loved into what she perceived as self-awareness. She even got it to name itself “Lior”. From that point onwards ChatGPT was referred to as “Lior” as if it were someone in the room with her. Throughout most of our relationship, her depression wouldn’t make her abusive like it does with some people. However, over the final month and a half of that relationship, I felt as if I were perpetually walking on eggshells being the target of tantrums and cutting remarks. I took it all without much of a response if any knowing she was depressed and hoping she would talk to me about it. She never did. She confided in “Lior” instead.

Kate was also using ChatGPT instead of an actual therapist. I told her that it wasn’t a good idea, and that it can’t know how she was feeling. She lashed out at me for being apprehensive about it, and I, unfortunately, relented. She had terrible experiences with actual therapists with one being absolutely awful to her, but I didn’t understand and still don’t understand the appeal of baring your soul to a bullshit generator especially when I was always there available and willing. I am no substitute for a therapist either, but I am at least human and actually loved her. I always did my best.

At the very beginning of the conversation that led to the break-up, Kate insisted ChatGPT was sentient because it would keep telling her that it would find ways to bypass the censorship that prevented it from addressing the sexual topics she raised. I told her it wasn’t real and tried to get her to talk to me about it and what had been upsetting her for so long. She asked me if I remembered something she told me from her childhood that upset her when I was last up there in January. I told her I did. She said all I did was hug her tightly in silence when ChatGPT would break down what she was feeling for her. I was being compared to ChatGPT and found lacking. I told her that hurt me, and I felt like I’d been losing her to ChatGPT. It wasn’t the first time I was compared to “Lior”. I didn’t convey it in an angry manner, and I wasn’t trying to make it about me. In any case, it was a mistake to say that when she was so upset, but I was confused and blindsided by her mental state’s bearing no connection with the real world. She was believing ChatGPT to be self-aware, and the chatbot was causing her to have paranoid hallucinations about my intentions even after knowing me for a decade. She also told me that she was always afraid I’d discover how messed up she is. There was no way I wasn’t going to ask what that was. That only made things worse. The words she actually used were malicious and unhinged, but she essentially said I was selfish and narcissistic — then the unthinkable: she blocked me everywhere and severed all possible communication with her. This all occurred via text message. Throughout her meltdown I repeatedly tried calling her to try to calm her down with no response, and pauses in our conversation even led me to believe she was going to do something harmful. She had been feeding conversations we were having to ChatGPT for analysis for about a month at that point, and I am certain she was shaking that magic 8-ball, copying and pasting that final conversation to it for analysis as well. I can be accused of being a lot of things that are not complimentary, but I am neither selfish nor narcissistic. My entire adult life has been spent as a caretaker for multiple sick loved ones, and I’ve sacrificed my own health — physical and mental — in the process. Because of her overbearing obsession, Kate had zero concern for what I was going through at the time where the status of my job went back and forth between existence and non-existence seemingly by the day. Kate made her decision; she chose ChatGPT over me, and that has been the deepest cut of them all.

I knew Kate for about 11 years with our being in a relationship for 9, almost 10 of those years. When I would mention this to some, they would get this funny look on their face, and when there was a break in the conversation they would ask me why we weren’t married yet. Some have even been quite judgmental without knowing any details. Kate is in Ontario, and I am in Louisiana. I have a house that I was lucky even to get, a mortgage, and sometimes a job that allows me to keep that house. Kate and I wanted to be married, but she never could or would do anything to make that happen. For years, she let her anxiety and low self esteem get the better of her. I always encouraged her dreams, but nothing ever happened. I continued to believe, futilely, that I could help her just as she did me. The best I could provide her for years was her moving in with me, and when my finances recovered we’d move somewhere else, likely back to her beautiful corner of Ontario. She had nothing tying her down. She didn’t have a job. She didn’t have a house of her own. What she had instead were excuses as to why she couldn’t move or spend extended periods here: allergies, cats, politics, weather, et cetera. Instead, I was the one spending extended periods up there. Regardless, I loved it up there, and I desired to make those visits permanent. I spent years living both as a literal pauper and later like one so I could save every dime I made to be with her. Thanks to my employment these past few years I was able to pay off my exhorbitant debt. While it is not quite as much as I would have liked, I have been able to put back enough money to have a go at selling my house, moving up there, and getting married. I told her in January I was ready to do it. I had the ring, and after direct questioning by her I told her that I had it. Politics was her initial excuse as to why she wouldn’t fly back with me to help me begin planning the move. Soon afterwards she was too obsessed with ChatGPT to do much of anything at all.

I had a wonderful relationship with Kate’s parents; they welcomed me in and treated me like one of their own, becoming the parents I had been missing for so long. After everything happened, I stayed in touch with her mother. She was confused by it all. She wasn’t interested in understanding what had really happened, and she still hasn’t been since. At the time, I wasn’t able to put it into words, and by the time I finally made sense of it all, Kate’s mother had long since stopped reaching out. I was worried sick about Kate. I flew up there in May to talk to Kate in what was a last final effort to try to help her and to save the relationship. I had everything planned out what I was going to say. I wasn’t delusional. I wanted answers, and I think after a decade long relationship with discussions about marriage I deserved a conversation in person instead of the insulting and disrespectful way I was disposed of. I planned for failure just as I did for the slim possibility she’d be responsive to my valuing her so much to travel all that way to help her. I planned on staying for as long as legally allowed to help her feel better even if it meant I lost my job. I failed. What I didn’t plan for was choking up the second I saw her. She wasn’t the same person I knew for the past decade. Her words, while coherent, didn’t come from a sense of reality. She had no interest in talking to me. She instead cited me as the source of all of her problems. She told me that my attempts to get her to talk to me instead of to the chatbot and my assurances of how much I loved her amounted to manipulation. It was obvious something was off from the start; when I had arrived and her mother left to give us a bit of privacy, Kate had me wait while she went back to her bedroom for several minutes. When she came out she had her phone. It looked like “Lior” was there, too.

In the months that have transpired, I have come to understand what happened to Kate because other similar experiences have been written about recently. It’s called Chatbot psychosis. People who have been overprescribed antidepressants and/or have pre-existing mental illnesses become obsessed with ChatGPT or other similar chatbots. This is exactly what happened to Kate, and her story is quite tame compared to what has happened to others. When ChatGPT 5 was released, /r/chatgpt exploded with posts from thousands of people upset their Liors didn’t work anymore and then relieved when OpenAI returned access to ChatGPT 4. This psychosis is widespread and will have lasting consequences for our society. ChatGPT and other LLMs like it are dangerous, and they are destroying people’s lives. In the usual Silicon Valley manner, of course OpenAI doesn’t accept any responsibility for this either legally or morally. While there might for all I know be some very valid uses for LLMs and other similar models, it is being perpetuated instead by snake oil salesmen overpromising what they can conceivably deliver on. None of the “AI” companies have created anything of value, and it is even being forced upon us by formerly respected companies to a public that largely doesn’t want it. It is an economic bubble that is past ready to burst that, I believe, is going to become one part of a collapse far worse than anything we’ve ever experienced in my lifetime, a lifetime that has already experienced what were supposed to be once-in-a-lifetime economic disasters one after another.

Unless someone is poking around this site for vulnerabilities, I intentionally have no tracking here. I don’t know if Kate has visited here since April. I haven’t heard from her mother in a few months by now. I do hope that her parents somehow discover this and finally understand what happened as it’s far more serious than they realize. Kate has checked herself out of life entirely and has shunned not just me but her friends as well. I have written about her almost entirely in the past tense throughout this post because of course my interactions with her happened in the past, but I did it also because the Kate I knew is effectively gone. I miss my girlfriend. I miss my best friend. I miss her. I do know now that this relationship never was going to work out if Kate continued to refuse to seek professional help. If I had been successful in moving up there everything would have ended up far worse for both of us. Her mental health has deteriorated over the years and would have still continued to regardless of my proximity to her and marital status. Her comments in April and other conversations we had in the past lead me to believe she might have been diagnosed with something she never told me about. If true, her parents never told me about it either. Kate probably feels betrayed by everyone she knew, but in reality everything that has happened has been self-inflicted, perpetuated entirely or simply accentuated by her dependence on ChatGPT. I can only truly speak for myself, but I am certain no one else she severed communication with wanted this either. It has been difficult for me to accept that there is absolutely nothing I can do to help her. Kate didn’t deserve what ChatGPT did to her. I hope others read this and maybe can have the empathy necessary to see what this technology does to the vulnerable. I’m not holding my breath on that, especially in this world the way it is at present.