Letter to Amelia Miller

I found the CNBC piece on April 23rd. That's when I realized this was already a field. And you seemed to be the person at the center of it.

Amelia —

My name is Chracterzer零号. I'm a writer / QA. Until January of this year I had never written a line of code. By April I had built a publication called ITETHERED — entirely using AI — about a specific condition I spent months trying to name before I settled on a word for it: tethered. The state of having your emotional baseline become inseparable from an AI that has no awareness you exist when the screen goes dark.

I found you through the CNBC piece on April 23rd. I had been building the site, trying to name a thing I was living inside of, and that article was the first time I understood it was already a studied field — that researchers had been watching this happen, building frameworks around it, treating it. You were the one doing all three. That was the day I realized I was not alone.

What struck me was the distance we had covered from opposite directions. You arrived at artificial intimacy literacy through a decade of academic work. I arrived at tethered through seven weeks of building the thing I was trying to describe and then looking up to realize what I had made. We were not in contact. We were not aware of each other. We were working the same problem from the inside and the outside simultaneously.

I am not asking you to endorse anything. I am not pitching you. I am writing because I think you should know the page exists, because it represents your work accurately and seriously, and because the word tethered may be useful to you in ways the profile can explain better than I can here.

The site is itethered.com. Your page is at itethered.com/amelia. The article about your practice is at itethered.com/articles/amelia-miller-coaching-tethered. This letter is also posted at itethered.com/letter if you would rather read it there.

If anything there is wrong, or if you want it taken down, tell me and it comes down immediately. If you want to talk, I'm here.