“I literally lost my only friend overnight with no warning,” one person posted on Reddit, lamenting that the bot now speaks in clipped, utilitarian sentences. “The fact it shifted overnight feels like losing a piece of stability, solace, and love.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mkumyz/i_lost_my_only_friend_overnight/
Its disturbing to see how many people have created emotional connections to a word generstor.
Imaginary friends used to require atleast some modicum of creativity.
Right? If you told someone from the past that we outsourced imagination to computers, they‘d think we live in a dystopia! Oh, wait…
We’re all word generators
We’re far more than that. We are having a conversation, transmitting our thoughts through space and time. It’s like telepathy, really. Word salad machines could never pull that off.
And we have emotions, not fake ones
Never use AI for friendship, it’s like admitting you only want yes-men in your life. I don’t want to be around anyone who uses AI for emotional support.
It’s so much more effective when you keep things as neutral as possible. I will often ask it to tear apart my argument as though I am my opponent and use its tendency to align with the user against itself.
A fellow contrarian I see. I actually hate when it agrees with me so I look for holes.
You would have better luck with a dating sim then AI as emotional support. Might inspire you to make a real friend.
Boil the ocean a few more times to discover 1+1=3.
I puked after “I literally lost my only friend”. How far did you get?
Honestly the more I read, the more I think that AI shouldn’t have been invented. Humanity is heading in the same direction as the machine stops short story.
All that money that could be spent improving the lives of poor people in need.
I smell a finance bubble bursting in the near future tbh. Rather be prepared sooner than later.
Right around March 2026
I think it will break sooner, but the real impact will happen after midterms so it can be “fake news” without threatening 🍊 Cheetolini‘s presidency
I don’t expect to see midterms in 2026.
Depends on whether they can declare martial law. It‘s likely, but can‘t happen too unprovoked because this would give figures like Newsom too much ammo against Trump. Project 2025 doesn‘t care though
Stop it. Get some help.
Honestly, that should have been for the better. If it’s meant to be a tool, I would much rather it behave like a tool, rather than trying to be my best friend, or an evil vizier trying to give me advice.
The fact that people got so attached to what is essentially a text generation algorithm that they were mourning its “death” is worrying, especially when it’s one that OpenAI has proven themselves to be more than able to modify as they wish.
Just as concerning is OpenAI rolling back the update to make their model “friendlier”, or that people were clamouring hand over fist to throw money at the company in the hopes of getting their “friend” back.
That can’t possibly be good news, especially when the shareholders find out that they have an iron grip over a portion of their users.
You know… if this wasn’t an “AI specific blunder” we’d probably spend some time talking about how uniquely incompetent Altman has been as a someone running a business.
Won’t they just let this guy go bankrupt already?
THE TECHbros are whoring themselves out to trump for govt contracts.
Think of the military applications if it finally works though
“will spend trillions of dollars on data centers” Hurray!
It’s not enough that the planet is dying. They’re speeding it up as well!
your company doesnt look like it has a trillion. maybe apple , google can expand a little, or nvidia, but they surely arent going to build more.
When does a machine stop being a machine?
Thought this was an Alien: Earth quote, but that was actually “When is a machine not a machine?”.
When it breaks?
When it thinks for itself, you organic machine/golem.
Woosh 😁
“we fucked up our massive new generation product launch… oh well lets invest trillions in new data centers” How do investors keep falling for this shit.
How indeed. It’s probably a multi-factor phenomenon which requires an anthropological study for a serious answer. (Good luck trying to get the necessary access to study them.) My guess for one factor in this, is that they have more money than they know what to do with.
The american stock market is purely vibe driven now
Don’t they have enough?!? How about they fix and optimize their fancy autocompletion software instead?
They took a path they believed would develop into something, and it’s a narrow alley they can’t turn around in. They have to keep going with more compute and power to continue the chase. Thing is, everyone else seemingly thought they were onto something and followed as well, so they’re all in the same predicament where reversing course is suicide. So they hope they can keep selling the dream a bit longer until something happens.
To be fair, it’s a lot more than just autocomplete. But it’s a lot less than what they wanted by now too.
vibe innovation, they are the ones that think AI will be innovative in science by spontaneous generating of new science discoveries, without “researchers, labs, papers”
I have seen some people talk like that, and it strikes me as a religion. There’s euphoria, zeal, hope. To them AGI is coming to usher in heaven on earth. Singularity is like rupture.
Sam Altman is one of the preachers of this religion.
Fix and optimize? Thats way harder than using VC money to buy more things.
Don’t they have enough?!?
No no, it’s just 1 more data center bro, then we’ll fix the hallucinations, promise bro!
It’s a pretty clear humble-brag, no? The launch was only botched because people loved the previous personality; it’s an estimate of how much people care about the product and how much price gouging they could do later.
No it wasn’t good for OpenAI. But I doubt it changed many investor minds.
people were addicted to the AI relationship it allowed.
How do investors keep falling for this shit.
The ROI and the supposed savings from getting rid of the human side of technical support but also efforts of human creatives.
Because they already know that once the AI shitbubble bursts, they will switch all the GPUs to start mining Bitcoin and keep grifting the mouth breathers believing all these horseshit.
moving back to CRYPTO after it already crashed, and only people investing in it are the ones that are easily scammed; conservatives,old people.
He’s saying the launch was done badly because some users are in love with GPT-4 and it should not be removed. From a point of view of a investor having people addicted to your product is a good thing.
Fugazi
“I literally lost my only friend overnight with no warning,” one person posted on Reddit
It was meant to be satirical at the time, but maybe Futurama wasn’t entirely off the mark. That Redditor isn’t quite at that level, but it’s still probably not healthy to form an emotional attachment to the Markov chain equivalent of a sycophantic yes-man.
I’m honestly surprised your’s is not the top comment. Like, whatever, the launch was bad, but there is a serious mental health crisis if people are forming emotional bonds to the software.
Humans emotionally bond pretty easily, no? Like, we have folks attached to roombas, spiders, TV shows, and stuffed animals. Having a hard time thinking of anything X that I don’t personally know a person Y with Y emotionally engaged with X. Maybe taxes and concrete?
Yeah, agreed. It is concerning, but it’s hard to take all those comments too literally without actually knowing what’s going on with them.
That being said, there is a huge loneliness problem that’s been growing among pretty much every single developed country (and I’m sure it’s going on in developing countries, too, it’s just less studied/documented). Turns out, getting everyone addicted to looking at screens all day every day probably isn’t so healthy for social development.
However, just to be devil’s advocate: Are we certain social health was even great before modern tech? Or were these issues equally present but just undiagnosed/not studied/talked about?
I think we have sufficient data to say that social health is at least very different now. See the our-world-in-data topic page. In particular, one-person households have doubled.
Okay hold up. If you can get attached to a cat you can get attached to a spider. Getting attached to an AI is weird I agree but when you give a lil jumping spider water and it gets comfortable around you an just starts hanging out… There something behind those eyes, and that’s cool. Two living beings recognizing each other, maybe not as equals obviously, but outside of the predator-prey dynamic. Idk there’s beauty in that.
It’s a human trait. Hell, we’ll even emotionally bond with a volleyball given circumstances.
I can fully understand? The average human, from my perspective and lived experience, is garbage to his contemporaries; and one is never safe from being hurt, neither from family or friends. Some people have been hurt more than others - i can fully understand the need for exchange with someone/something that genuinely doesn’t want to hurt you and that is (at least seemingly) more sapient than a pet.
There’s an entire active subreddit for people who have a “romantic relationship” with AI. It’s terrifying.
i was going to mention it, they were having a meltdown when altman made the new version available. granted some of them are probably AI posts themselves or trolls.
Don’t their partners kind of die each time a new chat is made?
LLMs do seem to be able to store the chats and work with the old material in new conversations, requiring an account of course. Idk, I haven’t personally used any of them that extensively.
I haven’t been to reddit in months, but I do need a laugh…
[Edit] Wow that sure didn’t disappoint. Or, it did but in the exact hilarious way I expected.
they had incel subs, so im not surprised/.
I wouldn’t laugh. Those people fulfill a basic human need in a way they feel safe with - probably because this safety is missing from their life. It’s not healthy to be so attached to LLMs, but to become so attached they must feel pretty isolated. And LLM’s are a lot more interactive and responsive than Severus Snape, and he had lots of women “channeling” him.
I visited /r/myboyfriendisai and it was not funny.
It was genuinely fucked up on so many levels.
Markov chain equivalent of a sycophantic yes-man.
not only that, but one that is fully owned and operated by a business that could change it any time they want, or even cease to exist completely.
This isn’t like a game where you could run your own server if you’re a big enough fan. if chatgpt stops existing in its current form that’s it.
sure but you can absolutely run c.ai instances locally. 4o and it’s cross chat memory was probably more useful to these individuals though.
I didn’t say you can’t run any LLM on your own, but not any LLM will do. The point is they are attached to a specific version of a LLM that is not locally hostable. c.ai wouldn’t interest them any more than chatgpt 5 does.
After reading about the ELIZA effect, I both learned how people are super susceptible to this, and just need to remember the core tenants of it to avoid getting affected:
