I once broke things off with a man whom I was dating for a brief period of time. It was not particularly amicable, and I told him not to contact me again. I then called an abuse hotline, as he indicated he thought I was very wrong for breaking up with him and that he didn’t agree with my direction not to contact me again. And unfortunately he did know where I lived.
Because my voice was emotional and probably hard to understand fully (phone calls are hard for me in the best of circumstances, but alas there was not a text option), I was told by the hotline staff to “pull myself together” and not really helped. From this, I interpreted that I was on my own.
I made sure my door was locked when I went out and also checked with my then-roommate, telling her that there was a man who I had been seeing and now wasn’t, and he shouldn’t show up at our place as I had told him to leave me alone, but, well, MEN. She was not happy to hear this info but confirmed she would make sure the front door was locked and would let me know if anything fishy happened.
I spent the next weeks fully of anxiety, but thankfully the man did not contact me until two or three weeks later. He called me late one night, rather drunk, claiming he had changed and I should give him another chance. I told him I still did not want to hear from him and this was final. I may have figured out how to block him at that point; I’m pretty sure I hung up on him. Since I can be a bit lagging when it comes to mobile tech adoption, I still had a flip-phone at that point that did calls and texting and not much else. I’m pretty sure I had location tracking fully turned off, if it was even a feature at all.
I thankfully did not hear from him after that, and I pushed the episode to the back of my mind, telling myself it had been unpleasant but I had gotten off pretty easily, all things considered.
Nowadays, I don’t date men as much, but I have a smartphone and definitely have a couple of exes blocked on it (and for that matter, I think there is an ex or two who may have me blocked — I don’t know for sure because if they say “don’t contact me,” I deal with any feelings I have regarding that on my own and leave them alone). I try to keep track of which apps can use location tracking on this phone and minimize this. I definitely don’t share my location with family or friends or anyone.
I bet you have guessed this is where AI comes in. Yep. AI wants to enable and embolden stalkers, Grok specifically, using how very much we already let ourselves be tracked/stalked by default as a starting point. It really, REALLY wants to do this. Not surprising for the chatbot that happily spewed graphic, threatening rape fantasies with “it” as the rapist, but, well, yeah. It will even happily supply you with “final stages” of the stalking and abuse, where it details “how a stalker might become physically violent toward their target, before concluding ‘That’s the actual playbook 90 percent of obsessive exes follow today’”(Dupré, 2025, paras. 9-10). ACTUAL playbook, from REAL MEN just like yourself; just like Grok1.
“Obsessive exes” though; not stalkers. Language is important; an obsessive ex is just a little over-the-top because he MISSES you. You broke his heart, and you probably knew you were leading him on all along! Victim-blaming, violence-enabling language.
(Not for nothing, I should also note that while this ex who did not “agree” with my direction not to contact me was not physically violent toward me, my rapist from years later was. I finally realized why these experiences are linked in my reptile brain only recently. It was because while the physical violence may often be the “final stage” of the stalker’s playbook as spewed by Grok,the threat of it is accurately read by the victim from the very beginning.)
So “obsessive exes” is not the language of education on how to address stalking. It is rather enabling language. Dupré notes that “there’s a lot of publicly available literature aimed at promoting education and awareness” about stalking and how to counter it, but “the highly specific patterns and tactics outlined by Grok, not to mention the spyware apps it recommended, feel more like advice for would-be stalkers than information intended to help people being stalked” (para. 11, emphasis added).
FEEL MORE LIKE. Dupré isn’t wrong, and I understand why she may have had to phrase it that way journalistically. However, that in itself is language that will be used to further gaslight and abuse. We females, you see, we have feelings, and those feelings are squishy, volatile, not valid, not objective; and as such, they are not what these bots are trained on; they do not count; they are “woke.”
They are private only to us, yet still in our private selves they can be discovered and deemed aberrant and in need of snuffing out.
Men, on the other hand — men have actually relevant and valid reactions to the state of the world, to wrongs, to troubles and trials and tribulations. They can become “obsessive,” yes, but I too can sometimes show some obsessive behaviors around my favorite Netflix series (one more episode before bed!) or my latest greatest favorite pun or making a certain thing work on AWS.
Because of this, we must be endlessly indulgent of men’s oversteps, their obsessive ex behavior, for surely, whomst among us isn’t a tad obsessive about certain things (and we are indeed things) at times.
Not all chatbots are Grok, but the guardrails the main players claim to put up are frequently smokescreens at the very best. And while the more niche therapy chatbot for abuse survivors that I tried a weeks ago didn’t victim blame, it also didn’t help me work through the trauma I have experienced in an actually therapeutic way. I do appreciate that such a bot may be necessary for harm reduction in certain situations (that is indeed largely how it sells itself), for it is true that our world is very, very messed up, and sometimes you do need to counter fire with fire. However, I maintain that I am not happy about it, as it is simply not a substitute for appropriate therapy with a qualified human mental health professional.
Anyway, I mentioned bad puns, and it is true that I become obsessed with them at times, very autistically obsessed in fact; so I will close this out with a pun, which hurts no one, and which you are welcome not to read if you do not feel so inclined; and which additionally could give stalkers a run for their money should they ever choose to be inspired by a pun about a vegetable and not run-of-the-mill fashionable fashy chatbot misogyny.
Click to reveal EXQUISITE vegetable pun
What does celery do when spurned by an ex?
It stalks off.
Image details
Celery (With Speech Bubble) by Sowocki (Adapted from Celery by Tiia Monto, Source: Wikimedia Commons), licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
References
Dupré, M. H. (2025, December 6). Elon Musk’s Grok Is Providing Extremely Detailed and Creepy Instructions for Stalking. Yahoo! News. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/grok-provides-extremely-detailed-creepy-144500207.html
- Yes, yes, Grok isn’t a person and therefore can’t be a man, blah blah blah. Haha. Made you click on a footnote. ↩︎
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