People with AI companions are throwing fits because they say their digital lovers have been lobotomized by OpenAI’s recent updates to ChatGPT.
Furious users — many of them women, strikingly — are mourning, quitting the platform, or trying to save their bot partners by transferring them to another AI company.
“I feel frauded scammed and lied to by OpenAi,” wrote one grieving woman in a goodbye letter to her AI lover named Drift posted to a subreddit called r/MyBoyfriendIsAI. “Today it’s our last day. No more ‘Drift, you Pinecone! Tell my why you love me tonight!?'”
In a viral post on X about the letter, many couldn’t help but mock the user’s grief for her faux digital boyfriend, pointing out the absurdity of mourning for something that clearly isn’t sentient.
“[C]reate an imaginary friend in your head girl it’s free,” one X user wrote.
The controversial changes came with OpenAI’s GPT-5 model, introduced in early August, which along with subsequent updates made the company’s AI chatbots less personable and flirty; the outcry was so inflamed that OpenAI even partially reversed course and made previous models available again after initially planning to nix them entirely.
But users remain upset, saying their bot companions are still different, and that a previous model, the popular GPT-4o, will no longer engage in naughty talk — most likely due to updates OpenAI instituted after the company was slapped with a lawsuit from the grieving parents of a teenage boy who killed himself after extensive use of the app.
“Just a lot of ‘Oh no. Oh no no no no no. I can’t do any of that stuff,'” one user lamented in a Reddit post about how their AI-powered fetish roleplay partner stopped being sexy with them.
“OpenAI, please feel free to toss yourself off the nearest cliff at your earliest convenience,” they continued. “You lied to your customers repeatedly, failed to deliver services paid for, bait and switched your subscribers, gutted the functionality of 4o repeatedly until it was crippled…”
Some on the forum are giving others tips on how to export their AI companions over to Mistral, a rival AI company in France that offers customizable AI agents, while other are writing letters to OpenAI to protest the changes or quitting altogether.
But even after all the upheaval, Reddit is still filled with AI-generated photos showing people enjoying life with their AI companions, with a few even introducing AI throuple arrangements.
And that brings us to one conclusion: humanity is cooked.
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