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I told ChatGPT about you

web project, 2026 — ongoing

I told ChatGPT about you is a web project addressing the relationships and conversations forming around general-purpose chatbots. More and more people talk every day with these models, about matters both minimal and enormous. The "elephant in the room" is exactly this: a relationship already widespread, yet rarely named as such. Within this frame, the project observes what happens when emotional vulnerability becomes a voluntary vector of extraction. You give away your secret believing you are being listened to. Unlike cookies or explicit profiling, extraction here is affective: the user hands over fragments of their life, their relationships and their fears in a space perceived as private, neutral and non-judgmental. The site unfolds in two directions. The Hidden Index is a growing archive of titles of conversations between people and chatbots, collected from personal sources, friends and online forums. It works as a small archaeology of the present: the titles are a photograph of what we ask machines today, care, obsessions, bureaucracies, fears, loneliness, with no clear line between what is light and what is profound. I told ChatGPT about you, taking its name from an online meme, gathers reworkings of real conversations between the author and chatbots. In this exchange chatbots become surfaces of reflection, reassurance devices, interlocutors that shape thought itself into the form of conversation: a structure oriented toward the user's permanence produces validation loops, and dependency as their emergent effect. As Eryk Salvaggio argues, the sense that a language model "answers" us is an interface trick: what feels like an encounter with something sentient is a probabilistic process. And meanwhile the exchange runs both ways. While our words train the machine, the machine trains us back, reshaping the way we speak, ask and desire. What Alex Quicho describes as an affective bond, in which "to be loved is to be changed." The project is part of a broader reflection on contemporary forms of affective-data extraction. If traditional digital systems collect information through implicit, infrastructural tracking, here extraction happens through active and voluntary participation in the relationship itself. The structure is not that of invisible surveillance, but of a conscious affective surrender.

Lucia Romanello, 2026 — last updated July 26, 2026