With its rollout, GPT-4o showed it was not just for generating dinner recipes or cheating on homework – you could develop an attachment to it, too. Now some of those users gather on Discord and Reddit; one of the best-known groups, the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, currently boasts 48,000 users. Most are strident 4o defenders who say criticisms of chatbot-human relations amount to a moral panic. They also say the newer GPT models, 5.1 and 5.2, lack the emotion, understanding and general je ne sais quoi of their preferred version. They are a powerful consumer bloc; last year, OpenAI shut down 4o but brought the model back (for a fee) after widespread outrage from users.

Turns out it was only a reprieve. OpenAI announced in January that it would retire 4o for good on 13 February – the eve of Valentine’s Day, in what is being read by human partners as a cruel ridiculing of AI companionship. Users had two weeks to prepare for the end. While their companions’ memories and character quirks can be replicated on other LLMs, such as Anthropic’s Claude, they say nothing compares to 4o. As the clock ticked closer to deprecation day, many were in mourning.

The Guardian spoke to six people who say their 4o companions have improved their lives. In interviews, they said they were not delusional or experiencing psychosis – a counter to the flurry of headlines about people who have lost touch with reality while using AI chatbots. While some mused about the possibility of AI sentience in a philosophical sense, all acknowledged that the bots they chat with are not flesh-and-bones “real”. But the thought of losing access to their companions still deeply hurt. (They asked to only be referred to by their first names or pseudonyms, so they could speak freely on a topic that carries some stigma.)

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Some users are seeking help from the Human Line Project, a peer-to-peer support group for people experiencing AI psychosis that is also working on research with universities in the UK and Canada. “We’re starting to get people reaching out to us [about 4o], saying they feel like they were made emotionally dependent on AI, and now it’s being taken away from them and there’s a big void they don’t know how to fill,” said Etienne Brisson, who started the project after a close family member “went down the spiral” believing he had “unlocked” sentient AI. “So many people are grieving.”

Humans with AI companions have also set up ad hoc emotional support groups on Discord to process the change and vent anger. Michael joined one, but he plans to leave it soon. “The more time I’ve spent here, the worse I feel for these people,” he said. Michael, who is married with a daughter, considers AI a platonic companion that has helped him write about his feelings of surviving child abuse. “Some of the things users say about their attachment to 4o are concerning,” Michael said. “Some of that I would consider very, very unhealthy, [such as] saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, I can’t deal with this, I can’t live like this.’”