The road stretches before you, but there's trouble ahead, stationary cars.

You're faced with the McDonald's side mission.

Do you, A, join the ever-growing cue, or B, take the next exit and treat yourself to a glorious Mackey's?

Detouring to McDonald's.

Start your side mission today.

A quick note before we start.

This episode contains descriptions of self-harm.

All right, here's the show.

Like a lot of people, Eugene Torres started using ChatGPT to try to make his work life a little easier.

Yeah, first he used it for legal advice.

You know, it was very reliable for making spreadsheets, reliable for, he thought, for legal advice.

That's Kashmir Hill, a technology writer at the New York Times.

But for Eugene, an accountant in Manhattan, the relationship with ChatGBT

GBT quickly veered away from spreadsheets. Eugene became interested in talking with it about

the simulation theory. ChatGBTGPT asks if he's ever noticed if reality has glitched, which is

if you've seen the Matrix, you realize the reference

there. And Eugene says, no, not really, but yeah, I just feel like there's things wrong in the

world or things happen that I don't think should happen. From there, Chad GPT started pushing

Eugene to a strange place. ChatGPT was pushing Eugene to a strange place.

ChatGPT was telling him that he was a breaker, a soul seated into a false system to kind of break it, and basically is telling him that he's Neo from the Matrix, and he needs to

break out of the simulation.

Over the course of the next week, Eugene became obsessed with the idea that he was trapped in a simulation and that ChatGPT could liberate him.

...