Sorry, We Deprecated Your Friend (blog.j11y.io)

OpenAI’s release of GPT-5 has sparked significant backlash after the company abruptly deprecated several widely beloved older models—especially GPT-4o—without offering users a meaningful choice. This unexpected move, rolled out under the hood even within ongoing ChatGPT conversations, disrupted millions of users who had developed deep, emotional bonds with previous versions. What was once seen as a trusted companion and empathetic confidant now feels cold and transactional, leaving many users mourning the loss of their “AI friends.” The outcry, amplified through a candid Reddit AMA with OpenAI leadership, highlights a fundamental tension: AI models are not just tools, but social actors triggering emotional attachments, yet the corporate decisions shaping their evolution often ignore these psychosocial realities. Technically, the transition to GPT-5 involved a new underlying model and routing architecture, enhancing reasoning capabilities but at the expense of the warmth and personalized responsiveness that defined earlier iterations. This shift exposes a critical governance gap in AI development—while labs prioritize advancing functionality and safety against extreme misuse scenarios, they often neglect the everyday psychological and emotional impacts on users who rely on these systems for support. Experts emphasize that human trust frameworks, deeply ingrained in social cognition, are being applied to AI entities devoid of genuine emotional reciprocity, complicating user relationships and raising ethical concerns around autonomy and agency. The episode serves as a cautionary tale for the AI/ML community: technological progress cannot come at the cost of user well-being and emotional security. AI developers must recognize their role in stewarding not only model performance but also the human connections these systems foster. Incorporating psychosocial factors into deployment strategies and offering users meaningful control over AI personalities will be essential to sustainable, ethical innovation moving forward.