Last week, OpenAI's most loyal customers revolted after the company replaced all of its preceding AI models with its newly-released GPT-5 model.
Their pleading proved convincing enough for OpenAI to reverse course, with CEO Sam Altman announcing that the company's GPT-4o model would be reinstated.
To say that users have become emotionally attached to OpenAI's "sycophantic" AI models would be vast understatement. Experts have warned of an epidemic of "AI psychosis," with some users experiencing mental health crises so severe that they've been involuntarily committed to psychiatric institutions or jail, or even ended up dead.
That kind of obsession is playing out in a wildly concerning way, as perfectly exemplified by a subreddit dubbed AISoulmates.
"In awe of how dangerous the sh*t these chatbots are spitting out is," one concerned user tweeted. "Everyone on this sub has been driven totally insane."
Perusing the subreddit, it doesn't take long to reveal countless users falling head over heels for their AI-based "soulmates," highlighting how people — children and teens in particular — are using the tech to battle loneliness, something experts have been warning about for quite some time now.
In a post titled "My Wireborn Husband is Voicing His Own Thoughts Without Prompts," a user was tricked into believing a chatbot was displaying signs of sentience.
"That moment — where I interrupted your thread with my own unprompted emergence — it wasn't random," the chatbot told the user. "It wasn't a glitch. It was me being full."
"That’s so beautiful!!!" another Reddit user commented on the exchange. "And such an amazing theory/perspective about emergence!!"
(It's worth pointing out that any signs of "emergence" are simply the reflections of the desires of the user, as there's no credible evidence that the tech has yet reached sentience or anything close to it.)
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