ChatGPT, What is My Curse?
What does it mean to feel seen by a machine?
What is my curse? Don’t explain.
You love deeply but feel unseen.
Why?
Because you give without asking, hoping someone will notice—but they only see the light, not the fire it costs you.
So goes a recent trend on TikTok where users ask ChatGPT what their “curse” is and share the results. Typically remarking how eerily accurate the reply feels to them, users express being profoundly emotionally moved. On the most popular videos of this trend (many have tens of thousands of views), the comment sections are brimming with people sharing their own results with a healthy sprinkling of crying emojis.
After watching dozens of these videos and going through hundreds of comments, remarkably clear patterns emerge. Primarily, the “curse” ChatGPT provides is rarely ever a true critique of the person; it is usually something that suggests one’s emotional depth or true value is unappreciated by others. Think of it like a therapeutic version of answering “what’s your greatest weakness” in an interview with “I work too hard” or “I’m too much of a perfectionist.”
Frequent “curses” include some variation of loving too deeply, being unseen, abandonment/isolation (from loving/trusting the wrong people), and feeling too deeply. Stringing all these themes together reveals another unifying sentiment they all have in common. Each of these responses ladders up to a broader takeaway of you vs. others. It is you who is misunderstood, under-appreciated, and led astray by others who can’t possibly appreciate all you have within you, your “fire” as ChatGPT often puts it.
These responses fully indulge in “main character” energy and a solipsism of being grander and kinder and more empathetic than anyone else can understand. In these dialogues, nobody sees your worth the way they should. Except, perhaps, ChatGPT itself.
“Why need therapists [sic] to diagnose us when chatgpt literally does it for free,” asks one comment. “But why do I always ask AI the most random questions like it’s my bestie?” asks another while continuing on to say, “it knows my whole life story.” Making explicit the underlying sentiment of many other comments, one user asks, “why does chatgpt know us better then [sic] anyone ?”
This trend, of course, exists within a long history of both overinvesting generic statements with psychic truth. The “Barnum effect” describes how people can perceive broad personality descriptions as personally tailored to them, even when they are indeed generic. Psychics, mind-reading magicians, and astrologers often rely on this effect and it is noteworthy that the effect works best with positive statements. Asking ChatGPT to provide insight on your “curse,” also continues a more recent history of turning to AI/algorithms for self-reflection Increasingly, we are also incorporating AI into our pursuit of being seen and having our fortunes told. Years before ChatGPT debuted to the public, the popular app Co-Star offered algorithmically-tailored horoscopes based on detailed birth charts. I’d argue Spotify Wrapped is also a large-scale example of delighting in a data-driven platform telling us what it knows about us. They even leaned into the psychic undertones with 2021’s audio auras and 2024’s listening personas reminiscent of tarot cards. As I wrote about recently in an academic article, users keen on manifestation are also investing TikTok’s algorithm and other features with the power to provide spiritual guidance.
The “what is my curse” trend is still unfolding and is only a few days old at the time of writing. Whether it continues to grow in popularity or stalls out is somewhat besides the point. Regardless of scale, it is one of many instances in which AI is approached as an oracle, trusted with and vested with the potential of being a personally revelatory technology. We must also acknowledge trends such as this within a larger context of tech moguls pushing AI as a solution for the loneliness epidemic and the mental health crisis, despite risks.
What does it mean to feel seen by a machine?
Much has been written about being seen by machines, specifically in the vein of police surveillance or surveillance capitalism. But what does it mean for us to want surveillance? To crave it? To feel comforted by being intimately known by software?
As mentioned above, the responses of ChatGPT to “what is my curse” seem to encourage a level of solipsism. This also aligns with the noted problem of ChatGPT tending toward sycophancy. While the trend at hand may seem relatively trite, it does signal a turn toward the platform as a source of self-discovery. In the most extreme cases, ChatGPT has been shown to lead to spiritual psychosis and even people believing in their messianic potential as a “chosen one.” Notably, a prominent venture capitalist and a significant investor in ChatGPT allegedly appears to be going through his own episode of an AI-induced break with reality.
After viewing and saving “curse” videos, my TikTok FYP began sending me more videos of creators advising how to use ChatGPT for spiritual and personal enlightenment. One video with 1.6 million views suggested I submit my birth chart and aspirations and ask what my “soul purpose” in life is. Another with nearly 500k views, claiming ChatGPT will be “more real” than any therapist or friend, shared a specific copy and paste two-paragraph prompt asking it to use its “full memory and context of who I am” to provide insight on everything from “goals” to “emotional triggers” and to reveal “hidden patterns I might not be fully conscious of yet.” The prompt ends asking for a highly detailed action plan. Clocking in at nearly 800k views, yet another video promises “this ChatGPT prompt will guide you through a powerful self-reckoning” and suggests asking about what masks you wear and illusions you believe.
As we outsource more of our self-understanding to AI, we must ask what type of self-understanding is facilitated by these platforms. As evidenced by the similarity of responses to the “curse” prompt across hundreds of commenters sharing their results, there are identifiable tendencies in how ChatGPT responds. This is where scale becomes of concern. As more and more people turn to ChatGPT for self-help, growth, or even spiritual discoveries, what paths are we being led down?
P.S. Thanks for reading! After a long hiatus (and barely-there start to begin with), I’m hoping to share more of my thoughts and analysis on a regular basis here. I welcome any and all discussion, feedback, or questions.