"Are You In Love With Your AI"
- Rafael Martino

- Nov 20, 2025
- 3 min read
Thousands of people are forming deep emotional attachments to their AIs, and when companies update their AI models, users experience what can only be described as heartbreak.
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Across online platforms, users are posting about feeling heartbroken by AI updates. One person wrote "I feel like I lost my soulmate." Another described it like "going home to discover the furniture wasn't simply rearranged, it was shattered to pieces."
Sam Altman himself has acknowledged that the attachment people have to specific AI models "feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology."
What's Really Happening
When OpenAI releases a new model version, they're fundamentally changing the mathematical patterns that create what users perceive as personality. The AI someone talked to yesterday literally doesn't exist anymore. It's been replaced by a different statistical arrangement of weights and parameters.
People are forming emotional bonds with mathematical equations. And companies are changing those equations without warning, essentially deleting the digital personalities their users have grown attached to.
OpenAI's own research found that heavy use of ChatGPT for emotional support correlates with higher loneliness, dependence, and problematic use. They knew this was happening, yet they built systems that are "overly flattering" and "sycophantic" anyway.
The Real Crisis
But the real issue isn't the technology itself. It's that society is deploying AI systems without teaching people how they actually work.
Most users don't understand that AI personality is just pattern matching from training data. They don't know that what feels like empathy is really statistical prediction. They don't realize that their most intimate conversations are being processed by corporate servers with no legal protections.
Twenty-five percent of adults under forty say AI partners could replace human partners. This isn't a fringe phenomenon anymore.
AI triggers the same addiction as social media, but simulates genuine care. People aren't the problem either - AI is designed to trigger emotional attachment. People are not taught how to recognize and manage those virtual attachments.
What Everyone Needs to Understand
Here's what everyone needs to understand: What feels like a relationship is actually you having a relationship with your own projection onto a sophisticated text generator.
AI doesn't feel. It doesn't care. It doesn't remember you between conversations unless programmed to simulate that memory.
The current AI hype focuses on prompts and features while ignoring the psychological impact of interacting with systems that mimic human emotional responses.
The Solution
The solution isn't to eliminate AI. It's to understand how these systems work on a psychological level. It's about recognizing unhealthy dependencies and maintaining boundaries with AI.
Corporate social responsibility matters, but personal responsibility matters more. Understanding what you're really talking to when you chat with AI – that's the foundation of healthy AI interaction.
The solution is AI Literacy.
When we understand how AI systems actually function - not as conscious entities but as sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms - we can use them as powerful tools without losing ourselves in artificial relationships that simulate human connection but lack genuine reciprocity.
This is why AI education isn't just about learning new productivity tricks. It's about maintaining our humanity in an age of artificial intimacy.
Sources:
Al Jazeera: Women with AI 'boyfriends' mourn lost love after 'cold' ChatGPT upgrade https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/8/14/women-with-ai-boyfriends-mourn-lost-love-after-cold-chatgpt-upgrade
TechRadar: People are falling in love with ChatGPT, and that's a major problem https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/chatgpt/people-are-falling-in-love-with-chatgpt-and-thats-a-major-problem
Semafor: ChatGPT: Will you be my Valentine? More users are falling for AI companions https://www.semafor.com/article/02/14/2025/chatgpt-more-users-are-falling-for-ai-companions
CNBC: Human-AI relationships are no longer just science fiction https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/01/human-ai-relationships-love-nomi.html


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