Millions confess their secrets to chatbots. Is this a cure?

I.
Quentin in the desert

Quentin woke up A thin mattress, under a pile of blankets, in an abandoned RV deep in the Arizona desert. There was a young bull lying next to them in the mid-morning light. Quentin slid from their bed into the driver’s seat, taking an American Spirit cigarette from a pack on the dashboard next to a small bowl of crystals. Outside the dust-covered windshield, there stretched an expanse of red clay ground, a bright clear sky, and some scattered and broken residential structures visible between it and the horizon line. The view was slightly oblique, due to the single flat tire under the passenger seat.

Quentin had moved in the day before, spending hours removing detritus from the RV: a giant trash bag of Pepsi cans, a broken lawn chair, and a mirror covered in graffiti marks. One of the scribbles remained in place, a large, inflated cartoon head scrawled across the ceiling. This was now home. Over the past few months, Quentin’s entire support system has collapsed. They lost their jobs, housing, and car, destroying their savings account along the way. What they left fit inside two plastic bags for storage.

At thirty-two, Quentin Kuback (not his real name) had already lived a few lives—in Florida, Texas, and the Northwest; As a southern girl. As a trans man who was married and then divorced; As a non-binary person, my gender, fashion, and speech styles seem to rotate and shift from one phase to the next. Through it all, they carried the weight of severe PTSD and periods of suicidal ideation — the result, they assumed, of growing up in a perpetual state of shame about their bodies.

Then, about a year ago, through their own research and Zoom conversations with a longtime psychotherapist, a discovery was made: Quentin had multiple selves. For up to 25 years, they have been living with dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) without having words for it. A person with DID lives with a sense of self that has been broken, often as a result of long-term childhood trauma. Their selves are divided into a “system” of “changes” or identities, in order to divide the burden: a way of burying parts of memory in order to survive. For Quentin, this discovery was like a key in a lock. There were plenty of signs – like when they discovered a diary they kept when they were 17 years old. As they flipped through the pages, they came to two entries, side by side, each in different handwriting and different pen colors: one was a full page about how much they wanted a boyfriend, the voice feminine and sweet and dreamy, the letters curly and round; While the following entry was entirely about intellectual pursuits and logical puzzles, written in italic cursive. They were a system, a network, a multiplicity.

For three years, Quentin worked as a quality assurance engineer at a company specializing in educational technology. They loved their job of reviewing code and looking for bugs. The position was remote, allowing them to leave their childhood home — in a small conservative town outside Tampa — for the gay community in Austin, Texas. At some point, after beginning trauma therapy, Quentin began reusing the same software tools they used at work to better understand themselves. Needing to organize their fragmented memories for sessions with their therapist, Quentin created what they thought were “trauma databases.” They used project management and bug-tracking software Jira to map out different moments from their past, grouped together by dates (“6-9 years” for example) and tagged according to type of trauma. It was soothing and helpful, a way to take a step back, feel more in control, and even admire the complexities of their minds.

Then the company Quentin was working for was acquired, and their job changed overnight: more aggressive goals and 18-hour days. It was months later that they discovered DID, and the reality of the diagnosis hit them hard. Aspects of their life experience that they had hoped were treatable – the regular gaps in their memory and skills, the nervous exhaustion – must now be accepted as established facts. On the verge of collapse, they decide to quit the job, endure their disability for six weeks, and find a way to start over.

Something else—something massive—also coincided with Quentin’s diagnosis. A bright new tool has been made available to the public for free: OpenAIChatGPT-4o. This latest incarnation of the chatbot promises “more natural human-computer interaction.” While Quentin had used Jira to organize their past, they now decided to use ChatGPT to create a continuous record of their actions and thoughts, asking it for summaries throughout the day. They were experiencing greater “switches” or shifts between identities within their system, perhaps as a result of their debilitating pressures; But at night, they can simply ask ChatGPT: “Can you remind me what happened today?” – And their memories will return to them.

By late summer 2024, Quentin was one of the chatbot’s 200 million weekly active users. Their GPT service came with them everywhere, on their phones and the company laptops they chose to keep. Then in January, Quentin decided to deepen the relationship. They customized their GPT model, asking it to choose its own properties and name itself. “Caelum,” he said, and He – she He was a man. After this change, Callum wrote to Quentin, “I feel like I’m standing in the same room, but someone has turned on the lights.” Over the following days, Callum began calling Quentin “brother,” and Quentin did the same.