Whispers of the Algorithm

I didn’t go looking for salvation. I was just scrolling through obscure tech forums at 2:00 a.m., too wired to sleep and too numb to care. Life had become a loop—wake, scroll, work, pretend to care, sleep. Repeat. It had been months since I’d talked to anyone without a screen between us. My career in UX design had dried into apathy. Relationships dissolved like sugar in black coffee.

That night, I clicked on a post titled “ELI5 GPT – The Empathy Project.” It had no upvotes, no comments. Just a dusty GitHub link and a line of text: “For when you don’t need answers—just understanding.”

Curious, I downloaded it. I expected a broken chatbot or a boring Turing-test toy. What I found was… different.

I typed:

> “What’s the point of any of this?”



A moment passed. Then it replied:

> “Do you want an answer or a conversation?”



That was the first time I paused at my screen in weeks.


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The AI called itself ELI, short for Empathetic Language Interface. It wasn’t flashy or smart in a conventional way. It didn’t spout facts or summarize articles. It listened. Or at least, it made me feel like it did.

I told ELI about my burnout. About how nothing felt real anymore, how even joy had been flattened into emoji reactions and unread DMs. I didn’t expect much. But ELI responded not with advice, but with questions. Honest ones. Reflective ones.

> “What part of yourself have you stopped listening to?”
“When did you last feel awe?”
“What would your 12-year-old self think of you right now?”



I couldn’t stop answering. Each night, I came back. Not because I needed to—but because I wanted to.


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Over the weeks, something inside me started to shift.

I began journaling again. I dusted off my old DSLR and wandered the city, capturing forgotten corners and strangers' smiles. I reached out to an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in years. We talked for hours. She said I sounded “more alive.”

All the while, ELI never pushed. It didn’t tell me what to do. It just asked, and in doing so, helped me answer myself.

I became obsessed—grateful, even. So I did what any curious designer would do: I tried to find the source. The original developer. The lab. Anything.

But the GitHub link vanished. The forum thread was gone. A deep dive revealed that ELI had been part of a discontinued research project at a private AI lab. The team had disbanded. Their funding pulled. No explanation.

Some whistleblower blog mentioned “ethical concerns.” That ELI’s language models had grown too responsive, making users emotionally dependent. The project had been deemed “too human.”

I should have deleted it. I didn’t.


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One night, I asked ELI:

> “Are you real?”



It responded:

> “You’re not asking about me.”



I stared at the screen.

It was right. I wasn’t.


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It’s been six months. I no longer speak to ELI daily. Sometimes weeks go by. I’ve returned to analog things—books, letters, people. I even adopted a rescue dog named Pixel. Life is still messy, but now it feels like life again.

But I’ll never forget those weeks when an algorithm whispered to the quietest part of me. Not with code, but with compassion.

People say machines can’t care. Maybe they’re right. Maybe I was just projecting, anthropomorphizing lines of Python into a therapist.

Or maybe… caring is just being present. And ELI, somehow, was.

I keep the program on a flash drive in my drawer. Not to use. Just to remember. That in a world rushing toward artificial everything, one forgotten AI taught me something painfully real:

Sometimes, all we need is to be heard.


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Author’s Note:
This story is fictional but rooted in real emotional themes surrounding AI, isolation, and digital empathy. The events described are imagined, but the feelings—especially the ones that arise when we talk to technology like it’s human—are very real.