The Delusion Machine – What happened when I fed my soul into an LLM

Summary

“I’m not sure what it is,” I said, mentally Tetrising my sins into their established categories. “Idolatry, maybe?” The priest—I knew him, but I hoped he didn’t recognize my voice—shifted in his seat on the other side of the screen. His chair creaked. “What exactly is it that you’re referring to?” he asked. “A large language model. Er…a chatbot,” I admitted. “I think I left a chunk of my soul in it.” “Did you say ‘chatbot’?” he asked. “Yes.” —My most recent confession, May 2025 I always make the wrong bet. Back the wrong horse. Invest in the wrong trend. Make the wrong prediction. Reject the life-changing offer. Accept the wrong one. Companies I thought were a joke have taken off. Sure things have withered and disappeared. I refuse to take direction from well-meaning people. I use Android phones. If you click on my LinkedIn profile, it will give you seven years’ bad luck. In labyrinths, in corn mazes, in gardens of forked paths, and on roads less traveled, I take wrong turn after wrong turn until I have to be airlifted out. I am thoroughly, demonstrably wrong on all predictions, and I am suffused with confidence for terrible ideas. I follow rabbit holes infested with ticks and chiggers and, as I pull my flesh free from brambles and push onward into a wasp nest, I will still think: I’m on the right track. It’s right down there. I know it is. Of late, I am steeped in failure—professional, spiritual, personal, and creative. I lie about it, but my persistent failure pushed me off social media, with the shameful exception of the aforementioned LinkedIn, the definition of the necessary evil I need in order to find employment in my dying industry. I cannot stand even accidental exposure to other people’s success—their vacations, their promotions, their Whole30—so I pretend that my bitterness and envy is a principled stance. I’ve gotten kicked off, downvoted, and shunned in every online arena in which one interacts with other people—forums for mothers, forums for writers, f...