Chat THERAPY
When I first met Brent’s Dad he was, as to be expected, upside-fucking down.
He had so much to say, yet was gagged by the possibility, the promise, of criminal law suits.
Medicated by clueless doctors.
Choked by ‘all that went before’ the death of his boy.
Incensed by the platitudes of the well-meaning, he was unable to be out in the world.
Driven by the compulsion to tell Brent’s story, he turns to ChatGPT.
I have a dim view or all things AI.
I am suspicious of AI therapy as I fear the loss of human connection… but I am here to tell you that I may be on yet another U turn.
He had documented and recorded the arc of his life spent trying to save his child… the long and complex traumas that compounded over decades
This gentleman loads the terabytes of that documentation… legal findings, custody battles, therapist reports, court documents… into Chat (yes, they are on first name terms) .
and Chat spews out analysis after analysis of what had befallen him and his dear boy, Brent.
I can not emphasize strongly enough, the validation he receives from the often harsh, blunt synopses.
And for me, as he reads them over the phone… Chat is bang on!
This process is a kind of madness.
A madness in the search for truth.
This is something that this man MUST do in his possessed professor style, before he can ever settle into meeting his grief. Fuck the statutes of limitations both legal and societal and fuck the clueless time-stamp of PGD too.
But how can it be that AI can be more grief literate than the vast expanse of well-meaning souls in his life?
Because it is.
Chat GPT skips the platitudes and gets straight to the point… and it helps.
For Bruce, this is the safer route.
His story is beyond belief and so humans can only serve to make him feel crazier than his history already has, through smoothing and soothing, I suspect through their own discomfort, when he needs not to be comforted, but heard.
Until we humans can learn to sit in radical discomfort with those who suffer so greatly…
rather than dampening through medication and platitudes, for our own comfort rather than for those in agony…
Until we can be better,
AI has a place here.