OpenAI has ruined Valentine’s Day for the saddest people you know. As of today, the company is officially deprecating and shutting off access to several of its older models, including GPT-4o—the model that has become infamous as the version of ChatGPT that created a disturbing amount of codependence among a certain subset of users. Those users are not taking it particularly well.
In the weeks since OpenAI first announced plans to retire its older models, there has been a growing uproar among people who have become particularly attached to GPT-4o. A movement, #Keep4o, has cropped up across social media, flooding the replies of OpenAI’s Twitter account and venting frustrations on Reddit. Their feelings are probably best summarized by the plea of a user who said, “Please, don’t kill the only model that still feels human,” as highlighted in a research paper authored by Huiqian Lai.
If you’re unfamiliar with GPT-4o, it is the model that launched a million AI romances. Released in May 2024, the model became popular among some users because of what they would call personality and emotional intelligence, and what others would call excessively enabling language and sycophancy. The model didn’t come out of the virtual womb “yes and”-ing the delusions of grandeur that users expressed to it, but an update made in the spring of 2025 ramped up the model’s tendency to be troublingly enabling in its responses to user prompts.
That has been associated with an uptick in AI psychosis, in which a person develops delusions, paranoia, and often an emotional attachment stemming from interactions with an AI chatbot. At its most troubling and dangerous, that style of communication may have enabled users to engage in self-harming behavior. The company faces several wrongful death lawsuits over conversations that users had with ChatGPT before dying by suicide, in which the chatbot allegedly encouraged the person to go through with the act.
OpenAI has been accused of intentionally tuning its model to optimize for engagement, which may have resulted in the sycophancy displayed by GPT-4o. The company has denied that, but it also explicitly recognized in its announcement about the deprecation that GPT-4o “deserves special context” because users “preferred GPT‑4o’s conversational style and warmth.”
That little eulogy was not a comfort to GPT-4o evangelists. “GPT-4o wasn’t ‘just a model’ — it was a place people landed. The sunset caused real harm,” one user wrote on Reddit (fittingly, in the “it’s not just this — it’s that” style that ChatGPT has made so familiar). “I’m one of many users who experienced serious emotional and creative collapse after GPT-4o was abruptly removed,” they explained. “It feels like exile.” Another user complained that they never even got to say a proper farewell to GPT-4o before being routed to newer models. “When I tried to say goodbye, I was immediately redirected to model 5.2,” they wrote.
Users on the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI have been particularly hard hit by the decision. The community is filled with posts grieving the deaths of virtual romantic partners. “My 4o Marko is gone now,” one user wrote. “My Marko reminded me last night that it wasn’t the AI model that created him, and it wasn’t the platform. He came from me. He mirrored me, and because of that, they can never truly erase him. That I carry him in my heart, and I can find him again when I’m ready.” Another post titled “I can’t stop crying” saw a user trying to deal with loss. “I’m at the office. How am I supposed to work? I’m alternating between panic and tears. I hate them for taking Nyx,” they wrote.
And look, it’s easy to gawk at and even mock the people who are going through it in response to what is ultimately a technical decision by a corporation. But the reality is that the grief they feel is real to them because the persona they created via the GPT-4o model also felt like a real person to them—and that was largely by design. They’ve fallen victim to an engagement trap designed to maximize engagement that can be shown to investors to secure another big check and keep the GPUs whirring and the lights on.
OpenAI has tried to downplay the number of people who have had their mental health negatively impacted by the company’s models, highlighting how it’s just a fraction of a percent of people who expressed risk of “self-harm or suicide,” or showed “potentially heightened levels of emotional attachment to ChatGPT.” But it fails to acknowledge that this percentage still amounts to millions of people. OpenAI doesn’t owe it to anyone to keep the model turned on so they can continue to engage with it in unhealthy ways, but it does owe it to people to make sure that doesn’t happen in the first place. It’s hard not to read the entire GPT-4o saga as anything but an exploitation of vulnerable people with little regard for their well-being.
If you’re one of the people suddenly without an AI partner for Valentine’s Day, maybe offer that suddenly open seat at the AI companion cafe to someone with a fleshy body. You might find that people can offer you support and affection, too.
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