The Cure

A year ago, 250 million people were using ChatGPT every week. By February, that number rose to 400 million. Now it's 800 million. Of those, untold legions are confessing their innermost secrets to Al. This is the story of two humans-and their bots-on the very edge of therapy's new frontier.

- by Alex Mar

I: Quentin in the Desert

QUENTIN AWOKE ON A THIN MATTRESS, beneath a collection of scavenged blankets, in an abandoned RV deep in the Arizona desert. A young pit bull lay curled up beside them in the mid-morning light. Sliding from their bed over to the driver's seat, Quentin pulled an American Spirit cigarette from a pack on the dashboard beside a small bowl of crystals. Outside the RV's dusted-over windshield stretched an expanse of reddish clay earth, a bright cloudless sky, and a few scattered and broken housing structures visible between them and the horizon line. The view was just a little slanted, because of the single flat tire beneath the passenger seat.

Quentin had moved in the day before, spending hours clearing detritus from the RV: a huge garbage bag of Pepsi cans, a broken lawn chair, a mirror covered in graffiti tags. One scribble remained in place, a big bloated cartoon head scrawled across the ceiling. This was now home. Over the past few months, Quentin's entire support system had collapsed. They'd lost their job, their housing, and their car, gutting their savings account along the way. What they had left fit inside two plastic storage bags.

At 32, Quentin Koback (an alias) had lived a few lives already—in Florida, Texas, the Northwest; as a Southern girl; as a married then divorced trans man; as someone nonbinary, whose gender and fashions and styles of speech seemed to swirl and shift from one phase into the next. And throughout all this, they had carried the weight of severe PTSD and periods of suicidal thinking—the result, they assumed, of growing up in a constant state of shame about their body.