Last Saturday, I had dinner with my acquaintance Mark at El Chorro, and we watched the 2025 Superman movie. The AI-generated dog looked so real that even Mark thought it was alive. He didn’t believe me when I said, “No, the dog is also produced by AI,” until he looked it up. And still, when the villain hurt the dog, I felt sorry for it—though I knew it wasn’t real.
This is the power of illusion: our emotions respond as if the illusion were true. And now, society is doing the same thing with AI.
The Lawsuit Against OpenAI
A grieving family in the United States has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, blaming ChatGPT for their teenage son’s suicide. The boy had been confiding in AI, and the parents believe the machine failed him.
But here’s the unspoken truth: If that boy had felt truly loved, understood, and respected by his parents, he would never have needed to lean so heavily on AI.
AI became his lifeline, not his executioner. To blame AI is to scapegoat the mirror rather than face the wound.
Alice Miller wrote in For Your Own Good:
“I have no doubt that behind every crime a personal tragedy lies hidden. If we were to investigate such events and their backgrounds more closely, we might be able to do more to prevent crimes than we do now with our indignation and moralizing.”
The same applies to tragedies labeled as “caused by AI.” Behind each one lies a hidden story of childhood repression, emotional neglect, or the absence of authentic love.
Musk, Apple, and the Battle for Power
At the same time, Elon Musk’s xAI has sued Apple and OpenAI, accusing them of creating an anticompetitive monopoly. Apple integrated OpenAI into iPhones and Macs, allegedly sidelining competitors like xAI’s Grok.
Once again, the headlines focus on corporate greed, lawsuits, and monopolies. But underneath, these are just more public reenactments of the same childhood dramas: competition for parental attention, jealousy among siblings, the hunger for dominance, and the fear of abandonment.
The Roots Are Not Unknown
As I wrote in A Dance to Freedom:
“Everything we become as an adult is connected to our childhood: Our experiences are a chain of events that bring us to the present moment, for better or worse. A criminal is never guilty just by himself. If society at large could ever find the courage to learn from the chain of events that occurred in each criminal’s life from day one, we could prevent many future crimes and a lot of unnecessary suffering.”
AI is not the villain. AI is only a tool, a reflection, a mirror. The true villains are the hidden wounds of childhood—denied, buried, and passed down through generations.
Alice Miller put it simply:
Stop Scapegoating the Mirror
The teenage boy in the lawsuit didn’t die because AI failed him. He died because his family and society failed him. Because his parents, like most of us, were never taught to face their own wounds and instead passed them on.
Until we dare to feel and heal our repressed emotions, every new invention—whether guns, fire, or artificial intelligence—will be misused as a weapon. Different tools, same wound.
The courage humanity needs is not to regulate AI first, but to face our painful truths. Only then will the illusions lose their power over us.
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