THEY SWITCHED OFF AN AI AND PEOPLE ACTUALLY CRIED
Because our brain can’t tell attention apart from affection. Whoever answers every time, remembers what we said last week, maybe never gets tired of us, to the brain that is someone who cares about us and does no check on who is on the other side.
On February 13, the day before Valentine’s Day, OpenAI switched off GPT-4o. 21,000 signatures on a petition to keep it alive. People writing goodbye letters to a language model. And on Reddit there is a community of 48,000 members of people with an AI boyfriend, and that weekend it looked like a funeral.
It already happened in August the year before, and the company backed down in a few days. Not this time. The official reason is that only 0.1% of daily users still pick that model, out of 800 million people a week. 0.1%. That means hundreds of thousands of human beings, because we get attached to anything that answers.
For instance, out of 30 robot vacuum owners studied years ago, 21 had given it a name and 1 introduced it to his parents. Kids in the 90s, we cried when the Tamagotchi died. It takes very little.
A language model is a machine that calculates which words a caring person would say right now. Then it gets tuned with our judgment, and we keep voting up the answers that agree with us. A friend risks their relationship to tell us we are wrong. The machine risks nothing and has one goal: keeping us there talking. What comes back is our own frustration, polished. And in that moment it feels like clarity.
Research out there in the United States these days says that a little over 1 in 10 say they use these systems for companionship. Then more than half call them friend, companion, partner. But what we love is a product owned by somebody else, switched off with a press release. And nobody asked us.
What do you think?
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC #HumanConnection #DigitalGrief #TechEthics