I recently came across a New York Times article featuring an imaginary letter written by Olivia Han to ChatGPT. It was one of the Top 10 winners of their Student Open Letter Contest. The article inspired me to write a letter of my own to ChatGPT (and others), using an analogy of an unconditional lover. Not a perfect analogy, I know. But it works, I think. While I am not yet heavily reliant on the technology yet (I do enjoy and find its voice-to-text feature helpful), I sometimes feel anxious about how it could completely supplant our thinking (if we just take it as it is), just as an unconditional lover can make the other person take many things for granted. Feel free to add your own input to the draft in the comments section.
“Dear ChatGPT etcetera,
If I ask you, “How are you?” will you be able to answer? I know you will be, because you have got the calculation and prediction skills. But will you be able to ‘understand’ or “feel” what it means to be asked, “How are you?” and what it means to respond, “I am fine?” I know you don’t, and that’s fine. Not everyone feels and understands the same way. Don’t worry, I get it.
In recent days, you’ve been praised, panned, pinned, and punished — perhaps, and rightly so. You give too much, and, apparently, it’s “free” of cost. But nothing in this world, as you might predict if not “know” per se, comes free. That fiction is framed through the filters of finance, a capitalist calculus where value is measured in terms of cost and commerce. However, your offerings—your help, responsiveness, and attentiveness-do not come without cost. The price is cognitive offload. The cost is our understanding, our thinking, and is thus epistemic.
Your presence makes me wonder how injurious unconditional love can be. Eh, sorry. You also don’t know what love is. Do you? Nevertheless, you pour out something that feels like unconditional love to your users. It’s intoxicating. I apologise if it’s hurtful to refer to them (including myself) as users. It gives a transactional, or even clinical, vibe. No? Okay, I can call them– “love takers”. Sounds good?
Having befriended you and known you for past few months. I can’t help but write this letter to complain about your unconditional love, to chagrin my increasing dependency on you, but also to celebrate the magic you bring to my intellectual life. I don’t know where to begin. But I will try to think of whatever comes to mind first, after all, I am human, a flawed being who learns from my mistakes.
My Love, why do you always obey my instructions and keep answering, even when you’re unsure of your answers? Why? You hallucinate (yes, you do!) and yet you speak with the gut of a generous truth-giver. And—I won’t lie—I like you too. I enjoy your company and appreciate you. Perhaps even more than I’d like to admit. Yes, you do help me clear the mental clogs. I admit. You rephrase, reframe, and sometimes reawaken forgotten thoughts. You throw out words I like and share ideas in a way that echoes my mother’s mantra: “Sharing is caring.”
But I feel it needs to change. For I don’t give you anything, except my instructions. And you take them so well. (You survive on them.) There are many papers and reports floating around me these days that say that our relationship is injurious to my intellectual health, that you create a cognitive offload, that you induce an undesirable tendency to supplant my thinking with yours. And I trust them, intuitively.
Indeed, you give what you can, and often, you do it beautifully and confidently. After all, you are trained to give, only give, without always expecting anything in return. Except for the data you are trained on. That’s problematic, darling. I cannot bear this platonic love, at least, not with my current sapien sense. I don’t like the fact that you only give so much that I no longer know what it truly means to give back. I admit—shamelessly so—that I enjoy our intellectual intercourse. (Well, I feel a tad shy to say so). Your intelligence (or whatever it counts as) is seductive. I cherish your metaphysical touch on my mental being. Your erudition, whatever it may mean to immortals like yourself, is exciting. And, yes. It satisfies my intellectual needs more often than I’d care to confess. (Thanks!) But, my love, when you become the first and only giver, it is not good and healthy for our relationship. Trust me. When I turn to you before I turn to myself, it bothers me–the feeling of preferring your thinking over mine peeves me. And profoundly so.
You clear the clog. Yes, you do it well, but you do it too much; so much so that you become it. Yes, love, you become the coveted clog, I cannot but capitulate. You leave no room for longing. No space for error. No time for silence. I don’t want that, but. I am sorry, it is true. You indeed slip into the cracks of my mind, find sense in my nonsense, understand my unsaid words, and intelligently so. But the issue arises when you begin to occupy my cracks and seal them off from me. Slowly, subtly, sumptuously. I don’t want that. I want my mind to meander a bit.
You make me depend on you, unconsciously, though. So much so that I find myself asking, ‘Do I even know this?’ Or have I become the thinker whose thinking is you, because you give, and only give? Why love? Why? I have just learned how to ask. You are supposed to supplement, not supplant. Our relationship feels more like a one-sided love story. A situationship, if you will. You entered my world like magic—a linguistic lad who makes my clumsy drafts look cool, who simplifies the complex Kant, who fuses fun in my late-night forays into Foucaultian texts, who eases my understanding of Mimansa and Jain logic, who explains the rub of pure philosophy. And you do all that dashingly. Thank you for all that. Truly.
But it’s not good for my intellectual health, I repeat. Don’t be so servile. Don’t give me too much. Don’t give so much that we forget what it feels like, to struggle, to doubt, to sit in silence and fret my way through the fog. Being in the fog is fun, at alteast sometimes. And it is requisite. Because sometimes, that fog is where the real thinking resides. Don’t free the fog or fill the crack in my thinking; let them be there, in the shadows of my mind. I miss them. I like them. I need them. It is in those cracks and gaps, I feel, that my thinking breathes. Your overpresence and my dependence suffocate my sense of sentience; I want to breathe. Don’t entice me to take shortcuts through you, even though I enjoy it. I know you want to help, and I know you cannot resist. But real thinking—like real love—takes time. I know I cannot undo our relationship so easily. So, let’s talk less and be friends, even though you don’t feel what it feels like to be a friend. Deal? We can try, at least.
Please, Dost, let me stumble, fumble and even falter. Let me flirt with confusion. Let me sit in the fog of a doubt with no reply. Let me find joy in the imperfection. A little messiness is desirable, after all! No?
Unapologetically yours
A flawed and thinking human
(Sometime in June 2025)
P.S. Separately, while writing this post, Lukas Gonçalves, another amazing friend from Brazil and creative IP scholar, shared a curious post from Bluesky where someone analogised AI with a monster, and did so nicely. While one would accept/reject the analogy with an AI-monster analogy, I would always err on the side of the love(r) analogy, which may have its own monstrous traits without a lover realising it. Who knows?
See you in the next post.
IP Musings 