Amrou Al-Kadhi on why AI and OCD don’t mix: ‘ChatGPT has been vicious’
Opinion: After discovering that ChatGPT feeds their Pure OCD compulsion to continuously revisit past events, our columnist realised there's a way to break free

Amrou Al-Kadhi, Muslim screen-writer, drag queen and Attitude 101, empowered by Bentley honouree, opens up about their personal struggles with OCD, warning against the growing use of AI as a scapegoat for emotional avoidance.
Out of all the useless feelings we’ve been forced to deal with as humans, none is more painful than that of regret. It’s an impossible feeling to hold because there’s literally no way to change the past. And yet, when it hits, that sinking feeling that we’ve made a profound mistake, that we may have had a hand in our own current sadness — it’s unbearable. We search through the contours of our decision making, berating ourselves with knowledge we’ve only attained in our current life — yet we punish ourselves with hindsight, as if we were fools not to have that knowledge in the first place.
“I suffer with what’s called ‘Pure OCD’, where my compulsions live in my thoughts”
It’s the thing I struggle most with in my life. I suffer with what’s called ‘Pure OCD’, where my compulsions live in my thoughts. I relentlessly ruminate over decisions I’ve made in the past, go over every one of my faults in those decisions, replay old actions over and over as if I’m retroactively changing the outcome. It can take hours, torturing myself at home with decisions I made three years ago, berating myself for not having realised this or that.
I replay the decision, examining it from all angles, trying to find the ways I fucked up, plotting what my life would look like now had I made different decisions. It’s like there’s a simulation in my head of every possible future iteration of myself, and how one of those might have come to be had I taken a different course.
“We are literally living in our past, the site of our traumas, stuck in compulsions”
If people with OCD could time travel, the quantum fabric of the universe would dissolve in a microsecond. We would jump back into every possible wormhole of every possible moment and follow every time fork until every avenue of every beat of our past lives could be actualised. This is why people with Pure OCD struggle to be present — we are literally living in our past, the site of our traumas, stuck in compulsions in a way that obscures us from our present and our future.
When I feel dissociated from conversation, it’s usually because my mind is trying to wrestle with something that happened half a decade ago. It sounds so irrational, and it is — my psychiatrist tells me it’s my brain trying to protect myself from feelings of failure, shame, disappointment, discomfort. Instead of sitting with those feelings, my brain would rather try and exercise some control by forcing me to try to change the past. A relentlessly futile task, given that the one thing humans can’t do is change the past.
“You ask ChatGPT for reassurance, it gives it to you”
ChatGPT has been vicious in this regard. In fact, it’s a frightening platform for people with OCD because it indulges all our ruminations. You ask ChatGPT for reassurance, it gives it to you. You tell it about your rumination of something in the past, it walks through the wormholes with you, what your life could have been like. Hours and hours of time travel with ChatGPT.
The one thing all therapists tell you when you’re trying to recover from OCD is to not feed the ruminations — if they appear, you sit with the discomfort, and you do not indulge them. AI might throw a real spanner in the works — in a way, I’m training ChatGPT to time travel with me; the madness of my brain now has physical form on my computer, a perilous black hole of regrets. I’ve now forced ChatGPT to stop — I’ve given it a command to refuse any OCD indulgence. My life could otherwise be lost to these hypothetical simulations.
“Sometimes, truly feeling something is the only thing we can do to recover”
I’m exhausted living this way. And I’ve been told that until I finally reckon with the feelings of shame and disappointment that fuel my OCD, I’ll be living in the time continuum forever. So that’s the task for my recovery — taking the time to sit down and cry, scream, mourn what I have lost, instead of trying to change it. Sometimes, truly feeling something is the only thing we can do to recover.
This article originally appeared in Attitude issue 365, which is available to download and order in print now and via our app.