After having her second baby in November 2024, a mother began using ChatGPT for parenting advice, starting with questions about her baby’s sleep and weaning. She found the chatbot more efficient than Google searches and turned to it during a fraught night of wake-ups, where it assured her she wasn’t failing and that things would improve. She used it for health questions, such as whether a rash was ringworm (it wasn’t), and to create a family budget based on her husband’s salary and statutory maternity pay. She began trusting Chat when it helped her with postnatal anxiety, which she had suffered after her first baby in 2022. She would describe her anxiety, and Chat would reply with explanations about “perceived threat” or “need for control” and provide coping mechanisms she found more useful than six months of CBT. She started to rely on this, but later realized her use of ChatGPT had changed the course of her life forever. She now wakes in the night worried about her future, wishing she hadn’t listened.