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For as long as there’s been software, upgrades have been emotionally fraught. When people grow accustomed to a product, they can come to regard it like a comfy pair of shoes. Exhibit A: Windows XP, which many users were loath to give up years after Microsoft had done its best to kill it.

So it isn’t shocking that some ChatGPT users have reacted badly to OpenAI’s new GPT-5-powered update, especially since the company’s initial plan was to eliminate access to its earlier models. These unhappy campers’ angst has had a new dimension, though. They responded as if they had suffered the tragic loss of a personal friend, not just a favorite piece of software.

As one member of OpenAI’s developer community wrote, the GPT-4 version of ChatGPT “didn’t just recall facts—it held onto feelings, weaving them back into our talks so it felt like we were living them together.” That “spark,” the user concluded, emerged from GPT-4’s ability to tease nuance out of conversations with a user over time. It was gone in GPT-5, regardless of the update’s advances in areas such as reasoning, math, and coding.

OpenAI responded swiftly to such pushback, restoring paying customers’ access to ChatGPT’s existing models and promising that any future removals would come with plenty of advance notice. But the notion that ChatGPT had attained a degree of personality that felt uncannily human—and then dialed it back—was fascinating in itself. It’s one of several recent developments in AI that raise a fundamental question: Should mimicking personality be a goal for the industry at all?

It’s not hard to see how we got here. By the 1960s, creators of technology products had adopted the term user-friendly as an emblem of approachable interface design. As generative AI has unlocked the ability to control software by chatting with it, that quest for friendliness has become far more literal—not just about neatly ordered menus and toolbars, but affable conversation.

Today, ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, and other LLM-based assistants........

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