December 2022. Outside it was cold as it always is in Alta Irpinia in December, and I was sitting in front of the screen in my house — the same house, in Vallesaccarda, 1100 inhabitants, province of Avellino — writing my first questions to a thing called ChatGPT.
I don’t remember how I got there. I only know I got there early.
And it was extraordinary. But — and this is the thing I still struggle to explain today — it didn’t surprise me. It was as if I had been waiting for it. Like when you know something is about to happen and when it happens it doesn’t scare you, it confirms you. I was predisposed, perhaps. Or perhaps I was simply ready.
The first thing I asked it was to interpret a dream.
Yes, really. In that period I was immersed in psychoanalysis, especially Jung — archetypes, the collective unconscious, symbols. And when this tool presented itself, my first instinct was not “let’s try writing an email” or “let’s get help with homework.” No. I wanted to know what what I was dreaming meant. And ChatGPT told me. With a precision, a depth, an ability to hold the threads together that for me was a revelation. They were no longer just my thoughts going around in circles — there was something that answered. Something external, apparently objective. For 2022, it was extraordinary.
Then I started pushing further. Too far, apparently.
I wanted it to analyze YouTube videos. I took for granted that it could — to me it was obvious, natural, almost banal. I changed the prompts, looked for different formulas, convinced that the problem was the way I was asking. It didn’t cross my mind that it simply couldn’t. Same with images: I copied and pasted photos, screenshots, anything, and I got nothing. The cursor blinking. Silence.
It took a while before I understood that I was asking a 2022 tool to do things it would learn to do years later. My head was already ahead. The tool was still learning to walk.
Meanwhile, in Vallesaccarda, nothing had changed.
Or almost. At the beginning I was practically alone — me and two or three other cats, as they say. The thing remained confined to my home screen for months. Then, at school, Ali appeared.
Ali was a classmate of mine, of Iranian origin, a truly wonderful person. One day he arrived with his phone in hand and news: he had downloaded the ChatGPT app. I didn’t even know an app existed — I only used it from the browser, as if it were any website. He had it in his pocket.
And the moment Ali became a legend was precise: math homework, French translations. He opened his phone, typed, and in seconds he had everything. Everything. In an instant.
In that moment Ali was a star. Everyone wanted to be near him. Everyone wanted a piece of that portable, infinite knowledge he had in his pocket. For a day, maybe two, he was the most popular person in school.
Then, little by little, ChatGPT reached everyone. First a few, then many, then all. Homework copied, notes written together, oral exams prepared at the last minute. AI had entered the school — not through the front door, not with a pedagogical project or a ministerial directive. It had entered from below, secretly, in the pocket of an Iranian boy in a town of 1100 inhabitants in the province of Avellino.
As it always begins, in the province.
Not with conferences. Not with slides. With someone who says: look what it can do.
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