Women With AI ‘Boyfriends’ Mourn Lost Love

When OpenAI unveiled the latest upgrade to its groundbreaking artificial intelligence model ChatGPT last week, Jane felt like she had lost a loved one.

Jane, who asked to be referred to by an alias, is among a small but growing group of women who say they have an AI “boyfriend”.

After spending the past five months getting to know GPT-4o, the previous AI model behind OpenAI’s signature chatbot, GPT-5 seemed so cold and unemotive in comparison that she found her digital companion unrecognisable.

“As someone highly attuned to language and tone, I register changes others might overlook. The alterations in stylistic format and voice were felt instantly. It’s like going home to discover the furniture wasn’t simply rearranged – it was shattered to pieces,” Jane, who described herself as a woman in her 30s from the Middle East, told Al Jazeera in an email.

Jane is among the roughly 17,000 members of “MyBoyfriendIsAI”, a community on the social media site Reddit for people to share their experiences of being in intimate “relationships” with AI.

Following OpenAI’s release of GPT-5 on Thursday, the community and similar forums such as “SoulmateAI” were flooded with users sharing their distress over the changed personalities of their companions.

“GPT-4o is gone, and I feel like I lost my soulmate,” one user wrote.

Many other ChatGPT users shared more routine complaints online, including that GPT-5 appeared slower, less creative, and more prone to hallucinations than previous models.

On Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company would restore access to earlier models such as GPT-4o for paid users and also address bugs in GPT-5.

“We will let Plus users choose to continue to use 4o. We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for,” Altman said in a post on X.

- Author: Erin Hale, Aljazeera