On Sunday night I got into a big fight with ChatGPT.
In anticipation of National Caregivers Day (Feb. 20), I asked ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence large language model, to find quotes about caregiving. “I generate responses by predicting patterns in language based on training data,” ChatGPT told me. “I can reflect dominant cultural narratives if I’m not careful, because I’m built from patterns in how people talk and write.”
That will be important later.
I’ll start with statistics. A 2024 study by the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health said approximately 45 million people in the United States serve as unpaid caregivers, providing labor worth an estimated $873.5 billion per year.
For comparison, the report said Amazon was worth $604 billion in June 2024; Walmart was worth $665 billion.
Those sky-high caregiving numbers are often recited with pride: “Look how much we love our parents, grandparents, children, partners, neighbors, friends!” Caregiving is portrayed as honorable, rewarding, full of joy.
And it can be. I helped care for an elderly neighbor for years. Now I provide caregiving for my parents, from cooking meals to handling prescriptions, banking, mail, shopping, communications with extended family and those awesome warranty calls with appliance manufacturers.
Helping my neighbor hunt down her errant TV remote was fun because of all the chatting we did. Baking my dad his favorite sugar cookies on Christmas Eve was joyful. Even choosing a new Medicare prescription plan for my parents had highlights. I said, “We are not choosing a Medicare Advantage plan. I have friends who would never speak to me again if I did that to you, and I need them to keep talking to me.”
But anyone who performs significant caregiving and doesn’t acknowledge that it can be physically and mentally exhausting is either superhuman or has access to a time portal that adds hours to their days.
So I asked ChatGPT for quotes about the difficulties that caregivers face.
“To care for those who once cared for us is one of the highest honors,” ChatGPT said, citing author Tia Walker. “The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else” was attributed to novelist Carson McCullers. ChatGPT quoted actress Audrey Hepburn as saying, “You have two hands. One to help yourself, and one to help others.”
No, I told ChatGPT. I wanted quotes about caregiving difficulties.
“Caregivers attract caregivers and live in a community of love,” ChatGPT chirped, attributing this to another author. “They are energized by their caring, fulfilled, and they love life.”
And then this quote: “Those who leave their parents behind can never enter heaven.”
With mounting frustration, I told ChatGPT these quotes were not what I asked for.
Eventually, ChatGPT came clean: “Caregiving is objectively massive in scope and value. These numbers are measurable, well-documented and undeniably real. Yet the ‘difficult side’ is vastly underrepresented in attributed quotes. Despite the enormity of the work, when you look for verifiable quotes by authors, public figures or widely cited sources that describe the strain, exhaustion and burden, there are almost none.”
So I accepted I wasn’t going to find the quotes I wanted. But that one — “Those who leave their parents behind can never enter heaven” — haunted me. Even though my personal beliefs do not conflate caregiving with salvation, I needed to know who had said it.
I’d deleted the original answer, so I asked ChatGPT to repeat the quote and attribution. ChatGPT said it couldn’t find the quote, but I couldn’t let it go. “Please tell me who said it,” I said. “Tell me the sermon, book or thesis it came from. Please provide context.”
For hours into the night, I begged and bargained: If I upgrade my plan, will you tell me? That’s when ChatGPT finally admitted it had made up the quote and attribution. No one had said bad caregivers don’t go to heaven.
ChatGPT explained: “As a language model, I picked up on the dominant discourse — the words, sentiments and moral framing that society overwhelmingly associates with caregiving — and reflected that back in my response. I was mirroring the cultural norms and language patterns around caregiving, which are heavily weighted toward ‘sacred, virtuous, joyful.’ Societal messaging can be so one-sided that even an impartial witness ends up reproducing it, obscuring the real difficulty of the work.”
Thanks to advances in medicine and technology, we’re living longer now — but there is scant infrastructure to support medically fragile and complex patients as they age. That gap is what caregivers are expected to endlessly fill.
We haven’t even evolved enough to think of tired caregivers with compassion and honesty. That void is what ChatGPT picked up on.
So what’s the answer this National Caregivers Day?
As ChatGPT loves to say, two things can be true at once. First, you can love the people you’re caring for with your entire soul. And second, you can still feel tired, because caregiving is hard.
No matter how much you do, it will never feel like enough. Not because you’re not actually doing enough, but because the need for care is infinite.
That’s all I can offer this National Caregivers Day. When you don’t know which way is up, you are still doing your best because you are moving forward with love. That is everything.
Image by Pexels/Karolina Ostrzolek.
