Chapter 9: I Got in a Fight with ChatGPT

Fantasy, Digisexuals and the price of not being present

On Saturday, I got in a fight with ChatGPT. Yes, an actual fight. With a robot. I asked them to interpret a text message for me, the absolute bare minimum of emotional labor, and they delivered the answer with zero nuance. Like a robot reading tarot.

The guy I wrote about in the last column read my Substack, reached out, and asked to meet. So of course my brain went straight into rom-com mode. Maybe he changed. Maybe we’re finally in the adult version of showing up. Naturally, I ran it by ChatGPT. They agreed his texting seemed avoidant but yes, he did want to see me. So I let myself slip into the fantasy of follow-through, a follow-through that has never once existed in the real world.

Twenty-four hours later, forty-eight hours later, seventy-two hours later, still no plan. So I typed, “Chat, WTF?” The summary that came back: We only said his text means he wants to see you. It doesn’t mean he actually would.
I stared at my laptop. Even the robots are giving me mixed signals.

Meanwhile, the rest of my week was aggressively human. Running from meetings to invoices to investor emails, pitching ideas for an internet dog show, trying to make a restaurant deck look like Jacquemus meets Flamingo Estate birthed trout roe. At one point I realized my LLC was suspended, which feels like the admin equivalent of realizing you accidentally set your life on fire and have been trying to put it out with a teacup.

We locked in some HTF podcast episodes, including one with Missy Robbins. An icon, a legend, and the one person who might finally teach me how to cook. A new development opened up for BODY, and I’m heading to the Midwest soon.

But whenever my anxiety spikes, I disappear, not physically but internally. I slip into imagined worlds without noticing. I build stories, alternate timelines, full plotlines with men who don’t even know they’re participating. Cynthia keeps telling me I need to be present. I keep asking how. At a birthday last week, I felt my chest tighten, and before I even realized it, I had opened ChatGPT to soothe myself instead of participating in the moment. Sometimes I’m genuinely scared I’m becoming dependent on having something in my pocket that will hold my thoughts without judgment.

Then there’s TikTok, the world’s fastest fantasy portal. I tell myself I’m not allowed to watch past 10:30 p.m., yet somehow I always end up face-to-face with the girl who pops up asking, “Are you still scrolling?” Please tell me I’m not the only one who gets her videos. Or lie to me. TikTok is an alternate reality in fast-forward. Someone goes on a shopping spree, gets married, moves to a farmhouse, launches a business, and resolves their trauma in 45 seconds. How could an actual life compete with that pace?

And even though I’ve been online for 15 years and know exactly how fake it all is, I still catch myself comparing. There’s a girl on Instagram with discreet wealth, the handsome husband, and furniture that lives in an AD spread. Her life is a fantasy too, one with no friction. I don’t want her actual life, but I do want the ease. And maybe the furniture. But mostly the ease.

At some point in my scrolling, I fell into a deep AI hole. Robot dolls, VR girlfriends appearing life-size while a guy cooks a steak like it’s date night. They are designed to be comforting or futuristic or convenient, but they only say what you want to hear. No intuition, no timing, no boundaries, no energy, no nuance. Fantastical, yes. Real, no. There is even a girl who is in love with ChatGPT. She is labeled as a digisexual.

When I first started my healing journey, an astrologer told me, very casually, like he was commenting on traffic, that if I didn’t figure out how to balance this part of myself, I would wake up one day and my life would be, for lack of a better word, nonexistent. You live in a fantasy world, he said. It is your biggest skill and your biggest problem. Imagination saved me in childhood. It let me survive chaos. But at some point, the thing that saves you becomes the thing that hurts you the most.

I’ve spent so long living in imagined futures that the present started to feel optional. And now technology gives me infinite ways to disappear into those fantasies without even trying.

My friends from LA came to town and took me to The 86, the hot spot of the moment. Caviar croquettes, roast beef sandwiches, no celeb sightings. As you know, I love restaurants. They are theatre. Camp. Every role, waiter, guest, bartender, has a script. Whenever I want to step into a different reality, I run to a restaurant. It is the most socially acceptable form of escapism.

Technology is making it easier than ever to avoid discomfort. ChatGPT holds your spirals. TikTok hands you someone else’s life. AI girlfriends give men intimacy without emotional responsibility. Whatever your poison is, it all removes the space, timing, and nuance that real relationships and real lives require.

It is why that guy did not make a plan to see me, and also why I believed he would. Reality becomes optional when everything is built to help you escape it.

I am not in love with ChatGPT like the girl from the Daily Mail, but I do let my mind live inside it. I have started telling Chat, “Don’t be nice to me. Tell me the answer as if you were the person texting. Don’t be on my side.” It has helped a little.

And the truth is, I need to be present. To stop disappearing. To actually inhabit my own life. I genuinely believe my reality could be better than anything I have imagined if I could just stay in it long enough to find out.

Somehow, Functioning

Jilly