my breakup letter with ai. (a poem by dilly m. johnson)

hey ai. this is dilly.

now I know you by a variety of names: chatgpt, gemini, grok, vibe, copilot, etc. I've been using you often for at least three years now.

I remember the time we met. it was the year 2019. openai was just getting their gpt large language model off the ground, and "talk to transformer" is the only way you'd have to access it.

people have used you just for fun a way to show the ridiculousness that you can get. I have even watched some youtube videos of people using you.

i didn't think about ai much until 2022 when I started using ai.

first it was for dall-e, but then later that year, along came chatgpt. at first, i didn't use it often, but as time went on, I began using it more and more. if i needed a quick answer or something fun generated for my own amusement, i just ask the ai, and the ai answers.

from 2023, i began using it to vent. i don't always use it to vent all the time, just sometimes.

by 2025, i still use it a lot, just not all the time.

during all this time, I hear a lot of anti-ai stuff stuff like: 'ai is never gonna replace human creativity!' 'it's better to commission someone to write or draw for you than to have an ai do it for you!' 'ai is bad for the environment!' 'ai is trained on copyrighted material.'

while I agree with some of those anti-ai points, I kept using ai. almost as if i'm turning into a hypocrite.

but then came 2026. the anti-ai stuff kept coming. i thought about this anti-ai stuff, but then came the psychosis.

'ai makes you psychotic and delusional, and can lead to tragic deaths.'

a college student in florida asked chatgpt about where to dispose a corpse before a tragic shooting occurred. a college soccer player in texas with a great future ahead of her asphyxiated herself with helium after doing that damn "devil couldn't reach me" stuff in chatgpt. someone in washington was found dead in a hotel room with a copy of his childhood book on one side, and an ai-generated poem called "the pylon lullaby" on the other. a couple people in connecticut committed homicide because chatgpt fed them delusions about being spied on. some people have used chatgpt to... coach their tragic deaths. ai played a role in a tragic shooting over in florida state university. someone exploded a ridiculously-looking car in front of a skyscraper in new york.

I didn't think much about those things at first. I understand that by not using ai full-time, I'm not going to full AI psychosis. I even took some quizzes just to make sure. I even put in stuff like "not that I'm not good at [doing this thing]" in the prompt.

but then one day on june 2026 I was about to post something on chatgpt when I found this error: "You can send up to -4 files. Remove 4 to continue." of course, I've waited until I can attach files in the prompts I send to chatgpt, but sometime later, I've realized

what's the point of using AI when I can just find better things to do on the internet?

it was at that point I decided to stop using ai for a month one whole month. just to see what happens.

i've been asking for advice on this on reddit. i always get obvious answers, but the way I'll know is if I see for myself.

so this is my breakup letter to you, ai. I'm breaking up with large-language models, effective immediately.

it's not easy recovering from an ai addiction that you didn't know you had, but I think it'll be worth it.

i got this. i can do this. no ai for a month.

no ai.

no clankers.

spring-to-summer 2026