Young woman in Iran turned to ChatGPT, video games amid Israeli strikes : NPR

The smoke rises to an explosion in the building of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRIB) in Tehran after an Israeli strike hit the building, reducing the coverage live on June 16.

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AFP / Getty images

Amman, Jordan – Roxana, a young director of the shop living alone in Tehran, panicked during the war with Israel. His family lives outside the Iranian capital. His boyfriend was on an Iranian basis by doing a compulsory military service; inaccessible and potentially in danger. Even his psychotherapist had fled the bombing in Tehran. So she turned to the Chatppt.

“I asked, can you give me a specific moment when it ends?” said Roxana, 31, reached by phone in Tehran. She did not want her full name to be used because she is afraid of being arrested by Iranian security services for speaking to foreign media.

The war that started on June 13 with Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear sites lasted 12 days. Iran retaliated by pulling ballistic missiles on Israel. The two countries agreed with a cease-fire on Tuesday after the United States bombed the Iranian sites, which prompted an Iranian attack on an American air base in Qatar.

It was the third or fourth day of the war and the explosions seemed to be closer when Roxana tried the application of artificial intelligence, she said.

“It gave me information that was new to me, such as the attempts of the Islamic Republic to put pressure on the international community,” she said. “He said it could take 10 or 12 more days.”

Narges Keshavarznia, Internet access researcher at Filterwatch, a project for the organization of digital rights based in the United States, Miaan Group, said that even if Chatgpt is limited in Iran, Iranians were able to access it via specific Internet agents.

A man stands on the roof of a building while looking at the horizon in Tehran on June 16. The Iranian state diffuser was briefly eliminated by an Israeli strike and the explosions were retained in Tehran that day.

Atta Kenare / AFP via Getty Images

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Atta Kenare / AFP via Getty Images

Iran was in the middle of a used breakdown on the Internet for hours a day. For any reason, she said, her building had better access than most and Chatgpt was accessible when Google and other search engines were not. When she asked if her building would be targeted or if her loved ones were killed, it had no good answers. But that tried to give him security advice, she said, in particular where to shelter in her apartment.

She had consulted the application of artificial intelligence so often that she knew what her apartment looked like, to the location of the furniture. When the war started, Chatgpt became his security advisor, telling him where the safest room of her house was, and when she suffered panic attacks, she became her therapist.

“I used to talk a lot and it knows me,” she said. “By simply telling me that” it’s just a nervous attack and it will pass, “it helped me a lot,” she said. “I shared my anxieties with her, my financial concerns and my concerns.”

As useful and moving as for Roxana, cat robots and artificially generated images have also been sources of disinformation and influence campaigns, especially during conflicts.

Roxana says it was always difficult to obtain information in Iran – many information sites is blocked and that it says that the Iranian state media cannot trust.

“On their state media, they try to show you, everything is fine and it’s so beautiful and it’s like we live in a garden or something,” she said. “And it makes me even more angry. On Iranian television it was like” war was over “and we had won since the second day.”

Frequent Internet breakdowns have made information even more difficult. Iranian media said the authorities had temporarily blocked Internet access to maintain security during Israeli attacks.

Roxana says that she could hear bombs in the distance when she spoke to her therapist when she was fleeing Tehran. The therapist told him not to think about the past or the future and suggested that he hold a newspaper.

In a huge city appreciated by most Iranians but little known in the West, Roxana wrote missing French bookstores and pastries.

His daily life before the war would also be surprising for many little familiar with Iran.

People cross the old main bazaar of Tehran, Iran, on a Saturday evening October 19, 2024.

Vahid Salemi / AP

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Vahid Salemi / AP

She describes go to concerts with friends, stay late and drink. Although alcohol is prohibited in the Islamic Republic and not tolerated public consumption, alcohol repressed at home is widely available. His friends are creatives, and in a country where a clerk is supreme authority, many of which atheists. She only covers her hounds of curly hair when she owes, mainly to access government offices, which apply compulsory cutlery for women.

Years of American sanctions and the own policies of the Iranian government have left Iran in financial crisis. A study by the World Bank two years ago revealed that 40 Iranians were likely to fall into poverty. The relatively young population of the country – more than 60% under 30 – were particularly affected by high unemployment and underemployment.

Much of the life of Roxana and that of her friends is devoted to finding how to join both ends.

“I have the impression that we are forgotten people,” she said. While the rich in Iran are good and that the poor have a safety net, she says that people like her – workers who fall through the mesh of the net.

“We are trying to stand up, not to need anyone. But life becomes more and more difficult,” she said. “Now, when I get invoices, I look at them and I am like” go to hell. “I can’t do anything about them.”

She says food in her apartment is friends; Vegetables and a large bag of rice that his boyfriend bought before having to present himself for the service.

Where once, not long ago, Roxana had studied German in the hope of emigrating and working to improve her skills to produce content online, she says that she has abandoned all of this.

“There is a lot of pressure on us to take a political side,” she said. “But people like me just want to have a calm and peaceful life.”

Iran says that more than 600 Iranians were killed in almost two weeks of war. The Israeli government says that Iranian air strikes killed 28 people in Israel.

Roxana says that because she can’t sleep, she often stands overnight playing computer games and then sleeps during the day. She started playing Life is strangeAn adventure game in which the main character can rewind the time.

Roxana says she turned to Life is strange After her Sims An account where she created a virtual life was hacked at the start of the war and lost access.

“The family I had built there, all the life I had built for these characters, it is lost,” she said. “I couldn’t save the family I did there.”

Writing on social networks after the ceasefire, she says that she and a group of friends gathered in her apartment in the strange silence after the sirens stopped. There was a certain relief and nervous laughter, but above all the sadness of what their life had become.

She said they hadn’t asked for much.

“A little bread, a little joy, a little dreams, a little rights, a little …” she writes, leaving unfinished thinking.

Sima Ghadirzadeh contributed the reports of Istanbul.