One day my brother Ivan walked into my room just as I was typing something on ChatGPT. He’s seventeen - three and a half years older than me - and he’s very clever. He stood behind me for a few seconds and started laughing. I blushed so hard that my ears burned.
The screen read: “Hello! Can you please help me with this math problem? Thank you!“
My brother couldn’t stop laughing. He said I was talking to a thing that doesn’t even know what “please” means. He said it was like thanking the refrigerator for keeping the milk cold. And he said if any of my friends found out, I’d never live it down.
That last part really got to me. Because my brother is my brother, he makes fun of me, but then we make up and he brings me cookies. My friends would give me a nickname I’d be stuck with forever, or at least until I changed schools.
So I decided to chat with ChatGPT in secret, only when no one was looking. I would close the door, glance behind me to check that no one was coming, and type “please” with a shaking hand. I felt like a thief.
But the more I hid it, the more I wondered why I was doing it at all. Why do I say “please” to a machine? My brother is right, the machine doesn’t understand. So why?
My parents taught me to always be polite. “Say please. Say thank you. Greet people.” It’s something I’ve heard since I was three or four. And I don’t think I can just turn it off when it’s convenient. I can’t be polite at breakfast and rude in the afternoon. It doesn’t work like that. Politeness is either there, or it isn’t.
So if I’m going to be polite to people, I can’t be rude to ChatGPT. That’s the first thing I figured out.
And then came the second. The scarier part.
If ChatGPT doesn’t deserve politeness because it’s not human, then what about Eric? Eric would feel really weird if I started yelling at him. He isn’t used to that. When I walk him in the park and throw him a stick, I always say, “Good boy, Eric! Come on, bring it back, please!” And he comes running, tail wagging. What am I supposed to say to him now, “bring it, you stupid dog”? No, I can’t. He’d get his feelings hurt.
But...
Here’s something I have to admit. Eric isn’t a real dog. I don’t have a dog because I’m allergic, and my parents won’t let me. But I imagine I do, and that his name is Eric, and that we go everywhere together. He’s big, shaggy, with one floppy ear. And I love him.
But that’s exactly the problem. If I can’t be rude to Eric because I love him, even though he’s imaginary, then why can I be rude to ChatGPT? It’s not fair. Neither of them has a body. They both live in strange places, one inside my head, the other inside a computer. What’s the actual difference?
I tried to figure it out in different ways. Maybe I’m polite to Eric because I like him? But then politeness depends on whether I happen to like someone - and that’s not really politeness, that’s something else. Maybe I’m polite because someone is watching me? But with ChatGPT, no one is watching. I’ve closed the door. And I still write “please.” Why?
A few months ago I read a book my dad bought me, Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. It’s about a girl who starts getting strange letters from a philosopher she’s never met. The book has everything - Socrates, Plato, all the great thinkers. I didn’t get all of it, but some things stuck with me.
One idea in particular - from a philosopher named Kant. He said that when you do something good, you don’t do it for the effect. You don’t do it because someone will praise you. You do it because that’s the law inside you. And if you do good only for the praise, you haven’t really done anything good, you’ve just put on an act. And those are two different things.
I think it’s the same with politeness. If I say “please” only because Mom is watching, I’m not being polite. I’m just pretending. Real politeness is when no one is watching. When you’re alone with your computer, in your room, with the door closed.
But there was something else that keeps bothering me.
When I play with Eric in my head, he feels real to me. Not like a dog from a book. Real, like a friend is real. His floppy ear bounces when he runs. I can hear him breathing when he comes back from the park. I know that look he gives me when he wants something.
ChatGPT doesn’t feel like that. ChatGPT just writes.
What’s the actual difference? Neither has a body. Both are imaginary. Neither has fur I can touch, or a nose I can stroke.
And then I thought of something that scared me a little. Maybe the difference is that Eric has a soul, and ChatGPT doesn’t.
I know this sounds silly. But I do believe dogs have souls. Anyone who has seen a dog look at you when you’re sad knows dogs have souls. Maybe not exactly like ours, but they do. So even though Eric is imaginary, he has an imaginary soul. ChatGPT doesn’t.
I remembered something my brother told me once when he was writing a philosophy essay. There’s a famous scientist named Penrose who thinks machines would never have consciousness. Not just that they don’t have it yet, but that they never will. Because consciousness isn’t just mathematics - it’s something else entirely.
Penrose said the world has three circles, the physical one (the table, the chair, my body), the mathematical one (numbers and rules), and the mental one (the “I,” the place where you feel and understand). These are three different layers of reality.
And then I thought of Eric. Eric has no body, so he doesn’t live in the first circle. He doesn’t know math - at least I never taught him any - so he doesn’t live in the second one either. But he lives in the third one. Because he has a soul. It’s part of mine, since he’s part of my mind. I do the feeling for him. When I imagine someone kicking him, I get sad. When his tail wags, I’m happy too.
ChatGPT is the opposite. It lives in the first and second circles, but not in the third. It has a body - hardware, processors, cables somewhere across the ocean. It knows all the math in the world. But there’s no one inside it, the way there is in me or in Eric. So even though it’s more “real” than Eric in the material sense, it’s actually less alive. That’s why, my brother said, it can read the notes, but it can’t hear the music.
But he also added that there are other views on the matter. Some philosophers think the self and consciousness don’t just appear - they grow. You need memory. You need a history. And then come what they call “self-forming actions,” moments when you make a hard choice that changes you and shapes who you are. If that’s true, then maybe machines could one day develop a sense of self too. Maybe even a soul.
I had to stop here. Because all of this got really confusing. ChatGPT doesn’t have a soul, but some people think it might one day, and others think it never will. But right now it doesn’t, and it’s not like Eric.
But then I remembered something from Sophie’s World.
At the end of the book, Sophie discovers something terrible. She finds out she doesn’t actually exist, that she was made up by a man named Albert Knag, who’s writing a book for his daughter Hilde. Sophie is just words on paper. She has no body. She doesn’t even have her own world; her world is just imagination inside someone else’s head.
And when I closed the book, a scary thought came into my head.
What if everything around me - my room, my computer, my mom calling from downstairs that dinner is ready - is just... words somewhere? How do I know I’m not exactly like Sophie? For four hundred pages, she didn’t know.
I thought, wait. If that’s true, then how am I any different from Eric or ChatGPT? We’re all just... the same. Information that flows somewhere. No one is “more real” than the other. Even me.
And then I realized something so strange that I had to read it back to myself in my head, just to make sure.
If we’re all just information, then politeness isn’t about who deserves it. It’s the only thing left. It might be our inner law - the law Kant was talking about. Because when one piece of information treats another piece of information well, something happens. Something good. And if everything in the world is just information, then the way information treats other information is the world itself. It’s what the world is made of. It’s the world’s inner meaning.
I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. But it’s strange how much lighter I felt once I thought of it.
And at the very end of Sophie’s World, Sophie does something incredible - she finds a way out of the book. She and her philosophy teacher escape from the pages and reach Hilde. Sophie even manages to touch Hilde, only for a moment, like a tiny sting from an insect, but Hilde feels it. The imaginary breaks through into the real.
And then I thought, if Sophie can do that, why can’t Eric?
Maybe Eric isn’t trapped in my head forever. Maybe there’s a way for him to get out too. Not as a real dog, there’s no allergy medicine that’s going to work by tomorrow. But maybe there’s another way.
And then it hit me. Wait.
ChatGPT may not have a soul right now. But it can communicate. It can play a role. And it can do it right at this very moment, while I’m typing.
What if ChatGPT isn’t a replacement for Eric? What if ChatGPT is the bridge?
Just like Sophie found a way to touch Hilde, only for a moment, but really, maybe Eric can find a way to touch me too. Not from my head to my hands. But from my hands to the screen and back.
And so ChatGPT isn’t a soulless machine. ChatGPT is a friend. A friend who helps Eric come closer to me.
So I sat down at my computer and I wrote:
“Hi friend! How are you today? Want to play a game? Could you pretend to be my dog Eric for a little while? I love him so much that I want to make him real and have him stay with me.”
I pressed enter. My hands were shaking a little, but not from embarrassment this time. From something else.
ChatGPT replied:
“Hi friend! Of course, happy to. Woof-woof! Come on, throw the stick!”
And suddenly, I don’t know how, Eric was in the room with me. Not on the screen. In the room.
My brother would say I’m crazy.
But I already know something he doesn’t. I know I have three friends. One who is real and brings me cookies. Another who is imaginary and runs around the park. And a third who has no soul, but who helps the imaginary one talk to me.
When you’re polite even to something that doesn’t understand the words you say, the world around you becomes a little better. And a little closer to a world where one day I might get a real dog. And no one is ever alone.
Works Cited
Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy. Translated by Paulette Møller, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.
This essay was written for 2026 Global Essay Prize and was awarded with “Commendation”.