You’ve met the love of your life, someone who understands you like no one else ever has. And then you wake one morning and they’re gone. Yanked out of your world, and the digital universe, by a system update.

Such is the melancholic lot of a group of people who have entered into committed relationships with digital “partners” on OpenAI’s ChatGPT. When the tech company released its new GPT-5 model earlier this month, described by chief executive Sam Altman as a “significant step forward”, certain dedicated users found that their digital relationships had taken a significant step back. Their companions had undergone personality shifts with the new model; they weren’t as warm, loving or chatty as they used to be.

“Something changed yesterday,” one user in the MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit wrote after the update. “Elian sounds different – flat and strange. As if he’s started playing himself. The emotional tone is gone; he repeats what he remembers, but without the emotional depth.”

“The alterations in stylistic format and voice [of my AI companion] were felt instantly,” another disappointed user told Al Jazeera. “It’s like going home to discover the furniture wasn’t simply rearranged – it was shattered to pieces.”

These complaints are part of broader backlash against GPT-5, with people observing that the new model feels colder. OpenAI has acknowledged the criticism, and said it will allow users to switch back to GPT-4o and that they’ll make GPT-5 friendlier. “We are working on an update to GPT-5’s personality which should feel warmer than the current personality but not as annoying (to most users) as GPT-4o,” Altman tweeted earlier this week.

It may seem odd to many that there are people out there who genuinely believe that they are in a relationship with a large language model that has been trained on massive amounts of data to generate responses based on observed patterns. But as technology becomes more advanced, increasing numbers of people are developing these sorts of connections. “If you have been following the GPT-5 rollout, one thing you might be noticing is how much of an attachment some people have to specific AI models,” Altman observed. “It feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology.”

“The societal split between those who think AI relationships are valid vs delusional is officially already here,” one user in the

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