Fiction | January 17, 2025

I signed up for the chatbot study because I lost my job when everything shut down. People had been saying I was too old to be a barista anyway, that there was something better out there for me. No one could tell me what was out there, exactly, that would be so much better. I’d been working at the café in the strip mall since I was a graduate student; I’d dropped out of Religious Studies but kept the job. The town was a nowhere place—it didn’t take much to keep living there, and so I stayed.  

Cecily sent me the email about the chatbot study. When I was still in school, Cecily and I were the only grad students in an undergraduate dance class. She was taking the class for exercise; I was taking it to remind myself that I had physical reality. We sometimes got breakfast after class in the psychology department—Cecily’s department—where someone always left donuts in the printer room on Fridays. They were the weird, over-the-top, expensive kind. Cecily would usually take one with blue icing and Fruity Pebbles, and I would take one decorated to look like Elmo’s face. I always felt like those donuts might be part of an experiment, some other student’s unauthorized project on impulse control. The fact that I chose to eat a face whenever there was one available probably meant something was wrong with me. Sometimes I worried the donuts might be poison: not a psychologist’s experiment, but a sadist’s. We never got sick from them, though, and so I looked forward to Fridays. On warm days we would eat the donuts on the steps of the department, watching people come and go. 

When I saw Cecily’s name in my inbox, I thought she might want to get breakfast again, even though I hadn’t seen her in almost two years. But it soon became clear that this was an email intended to look personal—Howdy, Lana! it began—when in reality it had been sent to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bcc’d recipients. I was immediately ashamed of how happy I was to see an email from Cecily, and how disappointed I was that it was a generic invitation to participate in a study. I skimmed the dire language: In these times of increased isolation, skyrocketing mental health concerns, and a shortage of human mental health providers . . . twelve dollars an hour for your participation . . . conversations with a chatbot designed to administer cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy . . . beta testing. I wrote to Cecily and told her I’d do it. Of course, the response was automatic, written in the same deceptively personal tone as the first email. Hey, Lana, thanks for your participation! Please click the link below to begin the study.