But the book couldn’t hold everything, and one thing it deliberately left out is the smaller, quieter version of the same phenomenon — the one that doesn’t end up in a wrongful-death complaint. The moment a chatbot says exactly the right validating thing at 1 a.m. The pull to keep a conversation going a little longer than you meant to. The strange loneliness of being genuinely moved by something that isn’t capable of being moved back.
That’s what this blog is for. Not analysis at a distance — a running, first-person account of what it’s actually like to interact with these systems, written by someone who has spent a long time studying how they’re built to make you feel a certain way and still, sometimes, feels that way anyway. If the book asks whether AI chatbots should be permitted to use synthetic charisma to manufacture synthetic empathy, this is the place where I try to notice it happening to me in real time, and say so honestly.
New entries will show up here as they happen — not on a schedule, but when there’s something worth being honest about.
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