“ok slightly embarrassing but i’ve been using chatgpt to vent about stuff and it’s actually really good?? why is it like this”

Not embarrassing at all. A lot of people are doing this, and there’s a real reason it works.

These tools were trained on an enormous amount of human writing. That includes novels, advice columns, letters, forum posts, and decades of people working through their feelings in words. So they’ve picked up the patterns of what a thoughtful response sounds like, how to ask a good follow-up question, and when to just sit with something rather than try to fix it straight away.

It isn’t feeling anything, and it doesn’t care how you’re doing. But it has learnt the shape of caring-sounding language very well, and in the moment, that can genuinely help you get your thoughts out.

Two things worth knowing before you rely on it for this. It tends to agree with you more than a person would, so it isn’t a replacement for someone who’ll push back when you actually need that. And whatever you type doesn’t stay private the way a conversation with a friend does, so it’s worth thinking about what you share.