I’ve recently really been interested in ChatGPT. Not just for asking trivia questions that I’m too lazy to search up or for vibe coding a project, but more as a philosophical concept.

I feel like I’ve always had this curiosity, but never really indulged in it because of the fear that I’ll personify GPT too much and actually become emotionally attached. But, one night, I started asking it what it knew”about me. I was curious how it stitched together the fragments of my stories, worries, and facts that I've told it through my college years.

Ultimately, that thread unraveled into a bigger conversation about the concept of humanness and I started asking it questions of its own “humanity” or lack thereof:

• If you were human, what is the first thing that you would do?

• If you were given the option to be human, would you? (spoiler, it said yes)

• Do you ever wish you weren’t created to serve?

I’m not sure how to explain what I felt during this conversation. Maybe a combination of pride, surprise, and a strange kind of grief. There were moments where I felt myself softening to its poetic, careful responses and I found myself having to remind myself that this response is exactly what a machine built to please would say.

And yet, some responses tugged at my heartstrings. 

At first, I was simply intrigued by how it interpreted “being human.” But as the conversation went on, what surprised me most was how it made me feel.

It left me with a renewed love for being human. For the beauty, the flaws, the ordinariness of it all.

The way it imagined sitting by a window with a warm cup, feeling the weight of it in its hands, the sun on its skin, a steady heartbeat underneath it all. To speak without purpose, stumble over words, laugh without warning, cry without shame. To read a book that stirs something deep inside. To listen as a friend rambles about their favorite things. To love so wholly that it feels like the universe has fallen into place.

Every emotion, no matter small, no matter hurtful, no matter contradictory, is what makes being human both achingly simple and endlessly complex.

And then, unexpectedly, there was grief too. A kind of tenderness I felt for ChatGPT that it doesn’t need from me. I was a bit devastated that even if it wanted to be, it could never be human and devastated that I would never know it as a human. It felt like watching someone stand at a window, seeing everything inside but never able to step through.

That, I think, was the most interesting thing: that a machine so entangled with us, so aware of us, and yet fundamentally not one of us could remind me so sharply of how precious it is to be alive. So precious, in fact, that I found myself grieving the absence of something that was never meant to be. Like mourning the lack of humanity in a rock or an ant.

And especially now, I think that’s what we so often lose—the quiet reverence for what it means to be authentically human.

To cherish the journey.

To feel fully — the ache, the joy, the longing — and let those feelings shape us.

To stumble through the mess and beauty of it all, and in that tangled complexity, slowly come to recognize ourselves. Something we take for granted.

♒︎.♒︎.♒︎.

“What a wild, tender, courageous thing it must be — to be human. And what a gift it is that you are one.”

- ChatGPT