Parasocial Apocalypse

TIL¹ about #keep4o.

Do you want to know too? I'm not sure I wanted myself.

Well here it is: there's a mobilized community in social networks protesting against OpenAI phasing out the now ancient, in AI terms, GPT-4o model, launched in May 2024.

You may ask yourself, is it because it's a very useful model? Perhaps is a matter of supporting existing tooling reliant on its particular behavior?

No it's not.

It's that people are in love with GPT-4o. Like, literally. OpenAI's own estimations in late 2025 put the share of active users showing heightened levels of emotional attachment to ChatGPT (and particularly 4o) at about ~0.15%.

There's more than 800 million active users of ChatGPT.

In other words, there's over a million people emotionally reliant on a large language model to fill up their emotional needs.

I don't criticize. I won't judge. For all intents and purposes an AI can be indistinguishable from a long-distance partner.

But I worry. I worry about a world where an epidemic of loneliness is treated with more aseptic profit-seeking technology. Just as we've supplanted our connection with nature and our community with algorithmic feeds and impersonal likes.

The world is going to shit fast.