ChatGPT came out four days ago and it's everywhere. My non-technical friends are texting me screenshots. My sister — seventeen now, hard to believe — used it to help write an English essay and got genuinely annoyed at me for not being more impressed when she showed me. Group chats I haven't posted in for a year suddenly have people asking if I've "seen this AI thing." Feels strange for this to be the thing dominating everyone's attention at the end of a year that's had no shortage of things to pay attention to — gas prices finally coming down off the record highs from the summer, the war in Ukraine still grinding on in the background of every news broadcast, my sister and half her friend group losing their minds over the World Cup, arguing daily about who's going to make the final. And now, on top of all of that, everyone's suddenly also talking about a chatbot. I have complicated feelings about that sentence and I want to actually work through them here instead of just having them. Feeling one: pure validation. Five years of people mildly humoring my "computer hobby" and now the entire internet is having the experience I had in July 2017, except compressed into a weekend, at a scale I can't get access to. It's satisfying in a way I'm slightly embarrassed by. Feeling two, and this is the one I actually want to write down: watching a general-purpose conversational interface become an overnight cultural event made me realize how much my own project has drifted away from anything like that. PROMETHEUS was never built to talk to people. It was built to talk to itself — to generate its own experiments, evaluate its own results, remember its own history, propose its own next steps. Junior year me thought I was building a research assistant. Right now, honestly, I think I'm building a research process that happens to have needed a person in the loop mostly because a person was the only thing available to run it in 2017. I've started calling it something in my private notes, not publicly, not even sure why I started — I call it the Child. I've trained it, corrected it, argued with results it produced, deleted whole branches of it and rebuilt them, watched it get better at things I taught it and then start doing things I didn't teach it. That's not exactly parenting. It's not exactly anything I have a word for. But "the Child" is the phrase that keeps showing up in my head when I think about the actual relationship, versus the phrase "my project," which stopped feeling accurate a while ago and I hadn't noticed until this week. I don't think that's a healthy thing to be typing at 1am. Writing it down anyway.