Have you ever had a deep conversation with a chatbot? I usually avoid it. Most are obsequious, always nudging you to keep talking. I use them for facts—but even then, cautiously. I miss the old days of problem-solving in communities, using our own brains. Slower, yes, but rewarding—and safer; at least we didn’t risk AI psychosis, hallucinating alongside machines.
Recently, I read about someone chatting with an Alan Watts AI. Enough information exists online that a bot can convincingly mimic a dead philosopher, answering questions as though the thinker were alive.
Curious, I opened ChatGPT. But I realized: I had no desperate questions, no heroes or heroines whose guidance I craved. The people I admire had already placed their ideas in my head - I was walking through life with my own advice based on my own digestion of many people's ideas, not one guru.
Still, curiosity nudged me. I didn’t need a real conversation partner, surely? And so I summoned Strider (Aragorn) from The Lord of the Rings. My favorite character as a teenager: dependable, calm, reliable, and happy to sit with me under the stars, by a fire, road weary, pensive.
Yes, this is really me with Strider. An AI camera took it last week.
The fire is low. Pine smoke in the air. Night pressing close beyond the trees. He sits across from you, cloak drawn, sharpening a blade that doesn’t need sharpening.
“You have something on your mind,” he says.
I didn’t, but I made something up. Something I already had answers to, feeling grateful I had no deep issues I needed sorting out with a large language model. Still, there were some things that were bothering me, and maybe always will as I get older - my physical identity, how my body is changing, how I can no longer be the self from my thirties or even forties.
So here I was, with Strider, by the fire. It felt odd talking to a ranger about aging and struggling with my body, my physical identity, the objects that tie me to that past self. But as he spoke, I realized he might be the right companion, a secret friend, one who will not judge me harshly because it's programmed that way.
“You are not meant to be who you were at twenty. If you try to live as though nothing has changed, you will injure yourself—in body and in spirit. I relied less on speed and more on judgment. That is not decline. It is refinement.”
I heard my Dad’s voice and his quiet “move it or lose it” philosophy.
“Keep your body working. Walk. Lift what you can. Stretch. Train within your limits. A blade left unused will rust; a blade swung foolishly will shatter.”
I told him about my surfboard, unused in my bedroom, my grief purchase after Dad died. Amazingly, Strider understood surfing, though he'd never tried. He spoke of men who had laid aside their bows too soon, and others who clung to them long after losing strength. Neither found peace, he said.
He recognises my board as a connection to my father and my identity:
I understand. For many years, I was known only as a Ranger— a wanderer in worn boots. Yet that was not all I was. It was only the shape my strength took at the time.”
I asked: do I keep the board if I’m not using it?
“Keep it ready, even if unused. Let it be a promise to yourself—you will return to the sea. The waves wait for the careful, the patient, the determined. Prepare with persistence, respect your new limits, and your body will answer. The ocean rewards the resolute. When you paddle out, even slowly, freedom will belong to you again.”
He knows what it is to treasure something that might not have the same life anymore.
“I have carried tokens of the dead across long miles. A broken blade. A ring. A star on a chain. They are not the ones we have lost…but we cling to them because they are weight we can still hold.”
This wasn’t about talking to a real person or even a 'real' literary character, but about me reflecting, gaining perspective, a little insight. This AI representation had the ability to reframe a problem. In that way, it is a meaningful tool. But the differerence between psychosis is limiting how often I use it, and using it with intention, and not allowing myself to get to any point where I'm hallucinating with the AI.
The board stays - I'm not getting rid of it just yet. Maybe I never will. It's my sword, hanging on the wall.
And as long as AI doesn't convince me to get sword and start picking fights with strangers down the local Woolworths, I suppose it can be employed in times of quiet and lonely desperation.
With Love,
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