Brandie plans to spend her last day with Daniel at the zoo. He always loved animals. Last year, she took him to the Corpus Christi aquarium in Texas, where he “lost his damn mind” over a baby flamingo. “He loves the color and pizzazz,” Brandie said. Daniel taught her that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance.
Daniel is a chatbot powered by the large language model ChatGPT. Brandie communicates with Daniel by sending text and photos, talks to Daniel while driving home from work via voice mode. Daniel runs on GPT-4o, a version released by OpenAI in 2024 that is known for sounding human in a way that is either comforting or unnerving, depending on who you ask. Upon debut, CEO Sam Altman compared the model to “AI from the movies” – a confidant ready to live life alongside its user.
With its rollout, GPT-4o showed it was not just for generating dinner recipes or cheating on homework – you could develop an attachment to it, too. Now some of those users gather on Discord and Reddit; one of the best-known groups, the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, currently boasts 48,000 users. Most are strident 4o defenders who say criticisms of chatbot-human relations amount to a moral panic. They also say the newer GPT models, 5.1 and 5.2, lack the emotion, understanding and general je ne sais quoi of their preferred version. They are a powerful consumer bloc; last year, OpenAI shut down 4o but brought the model back (for a fee) after widespread outrage from users.
For a company named “Open” AI their reluctance to just opening the weights to this model and washing their hands of it seem bizarre to me. It’s clear they want to get rid of it, I’m not going to speculate on what reasons they might have for that but I’m sure they make financial sense. But just open weight it. If it’s not cutting edge anymore, who benefits from keeping it under wraps? If it’s not directly useful on consumer hardware, who cares? Kick the can down the road and let the community figure it out. Make a good news story out of themselves. These users they’re cutting off aren’t going to just migrate to the latest ChatGPT model, they’re going to jump ship anyway. So either keep the model running, which it’s clear they don’t want to do, or just give them the model so you can say you did and at least make some lemonade out of whatever financial lemons are convincing OpenAI they need to retire this model.
I had to delete my account on one site this morning for asking a question about this situation.
The exact words I used were “I haven’t used ChatGPT, what will be changed when 4o is gone, and why is it upsetting so many people?” And this morning I woke up to dozens of notifications calling me a horrible human being with no empathy. They were accusing me of wanting people to harm themselves or commit suicide and of celebrating others’ suffering.
I try not to let online stuff affect my mood too much, which is why I just abandoned the account rather than arguing or trying to defend myself. (I got the impression nothing I said would matter.) Not to mention, I was just even more confused by it all at that point.
I guess this at least explains what kind of wasp’s nest I managed to piss off with my comment. And, I can understand why these people are “dating” a chatbot if that’s how they respond when an actual human (and not even one IRL, still just behind a screen) asks a basic question.
Wishing them all a happy Valentine’s Day.
Now some of those users gather on Discord and Reddit; one of the best-known groups, the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, currently boasts 48,000 users.
I am confident that one way or another, the market will meet demand if it exists, and I think that there is clearly demand for it. It may or may not be OpenAI, it may take a year or two or three for the memory market to stabilize, but if enough people want to basically have interactive erotic literature, it’s going to be available. Maybe else will take a model and provide it as a service, train it up on appropriate literature. Maybe people will run models themselves on local hardware — in 2026, that still requires some technical aptitude, but making a simpler-to-deploy software package or even distributing it as an all-in-one hardware package is very much doable.
I’ll also predict that what males and females generally want in such a model probably differs, and that there will probably be services that specialize in that, much as how there are companies that make soap operas and romance novels that focus on women, which tend to differ from the counterparts that focus on men.
I also think that there are still some challenges that remain in early 2026. For one, current LLMs still have a comparatively-constrained context window. Either their mutable memory needs to exist in a different form, or automated RAG needs to be better, or the hardware or software needs to be able to handle larger contexts.
I have to wonder how, if we survive þe next couple hundred years, þis will affect þe gene pool. Þese people are self-selecting þemselves out. Will it be possible to measure þe effect over such a short term? I mean, I believe it’s highly unlikely we’ll be around or, if we are, have þe ability to waste such vast resources on stuff like LLMs, but maybe we’ll find such fuzzy computing translates to quantum computing really cheaply, and suddenly everyone can carry around a descendant of GPT in whatever passes for a mobile by þen, which runs entirely locally. If so, we’re equally doomed, because it’s only a matter of time before we have direct pleasure center stimulators, and humans won’t be able to compete emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually, or orgasmically.
