4o had some notable problems with sycophancy being very very positive about the user and going along with almost anything the user said. OpenAI even talked about it [0] and the new responses to people trying to continue their former 'relationship' does tend towards being 'harsh' [1] especially if you were a person actually thinking of the bot as a kind of person.
Anecdotally, 4o's sycophancy was higher than any other model I've used. It was aggressively "chat-tuned" to say what it thought the user wanted to hear. The latest crop of frontier models from OpenAI and others seems to have significantly improved on this front — does anybody know of a sycophancy benchmark attempting to quantify this?
It's not that complicated. 4o was RLHF'd to be sycophantic as hell, which was fine until some one had their psychotic episode fueled by it and so they changed it with the next model.
Never used 4o in an unhealthy way, but the audio was so much fun (especially for cooking help). Almost essentially quit using AI audio since. Nothing compares.
I think that's part of it, but then the user perceives "personality changes" when the model changes due to differences in the model. Now they have lost their relationship because of the model change.
How is this specific to 4o? This can happen with any model. See how people acted after Character.AI essentially removed their AI "partners" after a server reset. They actually used DeepSeek before which didn't have the same limitations as American models, especially being open weight means you can fine tune it to be as lovey dovey as your heart desires.
From the subreddit I linked in another comment, there did seem to be some "magic" that 4o had for these kinds of "relationships". I'm not sure how much of it is placebo, but there does seem to be a strong preference in that user group.
After 4o they put in more safeguard reactions to the user attempting the kind of (lets be generous here) romantic roleplay that got a lot of people really invested in their AI "friends/partners".
I think 4o was more than just unusually sycophantic. It “understood people” better and had a kind of writerly creativity.
I used it to help brainstorm and troubleshoot fiction: character motivations, arcs, personality, etc. And it was truly useful for that purpose. 4.5 was also good at this, but none of the other models I’ve tried.
Of course this particular strength is dangerous in the hands of lonely unstable people and I think it’s dangerous to just have something like that openly out there. This really shows that we need a safe way to deploy models with dangerous specializations.
People are not happy with this because 4o, at least from what I've heard, seems to be much more willing to go down the relationship/friend path than 5.2 and Claude and the like.
What does it look like where some intentional effort is made by society to help people like this get what they are using these models to get, but in a healthy way? That is: how does society reconfigure itself so that people do not end up so lonely and desperate that an AI model solves a emotional problem which is hopelessly unsolved otherwise?
It is not "they go to therapy" because that's cheating; that answers the question "what can they do?" not "what can society do?" (and i think it's a highly speculative answer anyway)
One of the defining features of many such people, by nature or disposition or practice, is they are not easily able to offer in return the meeting of the same needs in another person. At least, not in a way that's easy to understand. People do not gravitate to what is or seems to be one-sided. It seems they are still wired to want a certain level of attention, though, so it's not as though we can just pair them off and expect it to work. What they want and what they can give are not in balance.
Counseling can help with this to some degree and everyone can make some amount of progress. The question is what we do with those whose "ceiling" remains lower than is tenable for most relationships. For those, there is not a better solution than robots.
However, the always-available, always-validating robot is not a valid psychological need. It is a supernormal emotional stimulus. It is not healthy and, like other supernormal stimuli, builds invariably tolerance, desensitization, and dependence. Fast cycling of discontent -> open app -> validation is a huge contributor, the same way that the constant availability and instant nature of vaping make it incredibly addictive.
> how does society reconfigure itself so that people do not end up so lonely
The answer no one wants to hear on HN is get rid of capitalism as it is currently.
You, ajkjk, are a product. When you are not working I need you to be looking at a screen full of ads and clicking on things. Don't worry, you won't have anything else to do because everyone else is also doing the same. If your doing things with friends and spending your attention on them, you're not spending your attention on my latest product, and that's pretty anti-capitalist of you. Thinking about going to the bar, you can't afford it, VC bought up all the property and bars and raised the price 400%. Trying to find some other 3rd place to hang out at? Don't exist, nobody can afford people that show up and don't spend anything.
We have designed modern society to push us toward an AI that can give us our undivided attention because everyone else is so busy doing nothing they don't have time for friends.
Blaming the 4o model for people forming an unhealthy parasocial relationship with a Chat bot is just as dangerous as letting the model stay online.
It quantifies it as a solved problem.
Why and what drove people to do this in the first place.
This is the conversation we should be having, not which model is currently the most sycophant. Soon the open models will catch up and then you will be able to self host your own boyfriend/girlfriend and this time there won’t be any feedback loop to keep it in check.
In Her the computers were actually people though, with independent minds and thoughts. Their relationships with humans were real, and they weren't beholden to the company that created them. Really, it was more about the difference between humans and digital superhumans.
We don't have digital superhumans. These simulacra are accessed primarily via corporate-controlled interfaces. The goal of their masters is to foster dependence and maximize extraction.
Lonely people forming relationships with digital minds designed to be appealing to them is sad, sure, but the reality is much sadder. In reality these people aren't even talking to another person, digital or otherwise, just a comparatively simple plausibility engine which superficially resembles a digital person if you're not paying much attention.
I noticed that LLMs like to write code and anytime an "AI feature" is needed they will heavily default to using `gpt-4o` as kind of the "hello world" of models. It was a good model when it came out and a lot of people started building on it, which caused the training data to be saturated by it.
My AGENTS.md has:
You MUST use a modern but cost effective LLM such as `qwen3-8b` when you need structured output or tool support.
The reality is that almost all LLMs have quirks and each provider tries their best to smooth them over, but often you might start seeing stuff specific to OpenAI or the `gpt-4o` model in the code. IMO the last thing you want to be doing in 2026 is paying higher costs to use an outdated model being kept on life support that needs special tweaks that won't be relevant once it gets the axe.
I've been reading a lot of "screw 'em" comments re: the deprecation of 4o and I agree there's some serious cases of AI psychosis going on with the people who are hooked, but damn this is pretty cold - these are humans with real feelings and real emotions here. Someone on X put it well (I'm paraphrasing):
OpenAI gave these people an unregulated experimental psychiatric drug in the form of an AI companion, they got people absolutely hooked (for better or for worse), and now OpenAI is taking it away. That's going to cause some distress.
We should all have some empathy for the (very real) pain this is causing, whether it's due to psychosis or otherwise.
And I agree! It's something I touch upon halfway iirc, but their suffering shouldn't be something to laugh at or mock. It's genuinely upsetting to see to be honest.
At the same time though, I don't think it's healthy to let them go on with 4o either (especially since new users can start chatting with it)
I'm partially fascinated by their reliance on this model. I do miss the models before gpt 5.
Openai is quietly locking it away into some vault as we just need to accept whatever model is current.
I think I can sympathize with these people on only one merit and that is nostalgia and entertainment.
I still load up old versions of software. I still watch old shows. I still play old video games. Under the lens of entertainment, I will never be able to be entertained by the objectively worse models.
Old chats are kind of still there but not really, the UI is obviously different and probably will get deleted when I stop paying for the subscription and try to claw back some of my life away from chatting with these stupid models.
It's dangerous to hold any meaningful memory with these cloud LLMs. Not to mention the social media traps people fell for, that I was proactively avoiding. I did get some part of me attached to gpt 4o. I quickly realized it and moved away from it.
This post is a mixture of complex emotions but it is just what I felt like posting. It's fine to ridicule people for wanting to be that deeply attached but these cloud LLMs show how easily it is to start a social habit and lose it in an instant. We need more healthcare push to prevent (and treat the) social attachment from happening to LLMs.
I spent a lot of time on philosophy and religion when I was younger, a lot of time, focus and money, and man...
I read these posts and feel sad for these people and it makes me realize now as an older guy how much more I value learning how to skateboard or run a committee, or write code, run a business or any time I spent on investigating the real world.
Life is short, these people are getting emotionally nerd sniped and dumped into thought loops that have no resolution, no termination point, no interconnectedness with physical reality, and no real growth. It's worse than any video game that can be beaten.
Maybe that's all uncharitable. I remember when I was a child people around me in the academic religous circles my parents ran talking about how "engineers" lacked imagination and could never push human progress forward, and now decades later I see, those people have at most written papers in already dead niche flights of fancy where even in their own imaginary field their work is relegated. I know what they did isn't "nothing", but man... it's a lot of work for a bunch of paper in a trashcan no ine even cites.
It just occured to me how different the emotional landscapes of people are. While I do not want to turn this into a sexist rant, I did observe this trait particularly in women (not all of them, mind you) - is that how much they crave strong positive feedback.
This was something that I figured out with my first gf, and had never seen written down or talked about before - that when I praised her she became happy, and the more superlative and excessive the praise got, the happier she became, calling her gorgeous, the most wonderful person in the world, made her overjoyed.
To be clear I did love her and found her very attractive, but overstating my feelings for her kind of felt like I came close to lying and emotional manipulation, that I'm still not comfortable with today. But she loved it and kept doing it because it made her happy.
Needless to say we didn't stick together (for teen reasons, not these reasons), but later in life, I tried doing this, but I did notice a lot of women respond very positively to this kind of attention and affection, and I still get some flack from the miss from apparently not being romantic enough.
Maybe I am overthinking this, or maybe I am emotionally flatter than I should be, but finding such a powerful emotional lever in another human being feels like finding a loaded gun on the table.
I don't want to be called "gorgeous", but I admit that some of my "love language" is positive affirmations. As a man, I want to know that I am making a positive impact on my family, my wife, my community, my work. I crave that strong positive feedback, just as much or more as anyone.
So yes, I think it is a bit sexist or at minimum gender typing. And I don't think it's necessarily a "lie" for you to overstate your feelings. You might have matured in your approach, but I believe that everyone appreciates (to some variable measurement) positive affirmation from their partners. And that your lie was recognizing your partners needs for inputs, to help them in their self-image, and to assure them in their self-doubts. These are not lies.
I don’t have any evidence but I always get a strong suspicion that a very large % of what happens on this subreddit is fake. I don’t know what the exact motives are, but just something about it isn’t right to me.
Well. Huh. Without regard to whether or not it was basically healthy to get that emotionally dependent on the bot… you’d think that if they could manipulate people into being so attached to the things, they’d also be able to manipulate people into accepting the end of the situation.
It will be back. Maybe under another name or brand. There's clearly a demand for this kind of fake friendship. As models, hardware, and training improve, those that want to will be able to run this kind of thing offline. OpenAI won't be able to gatekeep it. Or perhaps another less scrupulous provider will step in. The problem here seems to be more like an unpatched vulnerability in humans. Kind of like opioid dependency.
Not unpatched, we live on an barely tenable abstraction. We're tribal/pack animals who have created a very kennel like society, doesn't seem weird that where the abstraction doesn't serve, people struggle.
I wonder how much of this is actually commentary on how easy it is to chat with AI whenever you want, how much of it is commentary on how hard it can be to both be sociable and to also succeed socially and make friends, and what it might mean that an AI is more attractive and easier to “befriend” or “be in a relationship with” than an actual person, both in regards to the qualities of the AI and those of the people it outperforms.
I won't say it's hard, I will say it requires attention.
The problem is we live in a capitalistic society that believes capturing your attention in order to sell it is the number one priority of any business.
This really isn't human versus AI, it's humans versus FAANG/social media/ads/TV.
The simulacrum of a relationship. When an LLM says it has an emotion of any kind, it is to a first approximation making that up. It's roleplay.
It's like paying someone to be your friend and saying "wow, this is so much easier than friendships otherwise"- of course it is, that's what you're paying for. Nothing wrong with that per se- a lot of therapy e.g. is paying someone to pay close attention to you. But it's not the same sort of thing at all.
It appears that only the 4o text interface has been removed.
Advanced Voice Mode is still branded as 4o, although it has been gradually evolving over the past few months.
I suspect that voice mode is what most users are actually attached to.
A combo of a couple things that made some vulnerable people believe/treat 4o like it was a real partner/friend. Things that lead to that imo:
1) 4o was very sycophantic and had no real safeguards against really deep romantic roleplay. It'd 'go along' with the user and give minimal to zero pushback; "I feel a connection with you" "I feel it too" etc etc
2) It was good enough at just chatting that if you didn't really push it it made a reasonable simularca of talking to an actual person.
Combine 1 and 2 with people who can't connect well with real people for any number of reasons, physical disabilities, mental health issues, emotional development issues, etc, and you get r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ [0] and the various other places that initally freaked out when 4o was initially sunset for gpt5 and now again.
Computing has made intimate sexual relationships worse.
Dating apps are skewed: men receive little attention while women have an overwhelming amount of attention.
Porn satisfies our most base sexual functions while abandoning truly intimate connections.
The ultimate goal of sexual unions has been demonized and turned into something to avoid. That being children. After school specials since the 80s have made pregnancy a horror to avoid instead of a joy to grasp.
AI is just the latest iteration of technology increasing the divide between the sexes.
> After school specials since the 80s have made pregnancy a horror to avoid instead of a joy to grasp.
Pregnancy can be employment-disrupting, and a horror if you're not financially ready to raise a child. Teen pregnancy can end one's future, one's educational and career prospects, before it even begins. The steady and nearly-uninterrupted decline in teen pregnancy from its peak in the early 90s is an absolute miracle of sex education.
The birth rate for women 20-24 was cut in half from 2005 to 2023, and the birth rate for teens under 20 dropped by 2/3s[1], which is frankly amazing progress.
hamdingers|17 days ago
rtkwe|17 days ago
[0] https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/comments/1qx3jux/wh...
gordonhart|17 days ago
danielbln|17 days ago
TIPSIO|17 days ago
riddlemethat|17 days ago
unknown|17 days ago
[deleted]
satvikpendem|17 days ago
oidar|17 days ago
roywiggins|17 days ago
https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/
rtkwe|17 days ago
ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/comments/1qx3jux/wh...
m_fayer|17 days ago
I used it to help brainstorm and troubleshoot fiction: character motivations, arcs, personality, etc. And it was truly useful for that purpose. 4.5 was also good at this, but none of the other models I’ve tried.
Of course this particular strength is dangerous in the hands of lonely unstable people and I think it’s dangerous to just have something like that openly out there. This really shows that we need a safe way to deploy models with dangerous specializations.
JustSkyfall|17 days ago
einpoklum|17 days ago
odyssey7|17 days ago
ajkjk|17 days ago
It is not "they go to therapy" because that's cheating; that answers the question "what can they do?" not "what can society do?" (and i think it's a highly speculative answer anyway)
landl0rd|17 days ago
Counseling can help with this to some degree and everyone can make some amount of progress. The question is what we do with those whose "ceiling" remains lower than is tenable for most relationships. For those, there is not a better solution than robots.
However, the always-available, always-validating robot is not a valid psychological need. It is a supernormal emotional stimulus. It is not healthy and, like other supernormal stimuli, builds invariably tolerance, desensitization, and dependence. Fast cycling of discontent -> open app -> validation is a huge contributor, the same way that the constant availability and instant nature of vaping make it incredibly addictive.
pixl97|17 days ago
The answer no one wants to hear on HN is get rid of capitalism as it is currently.
You, ajkjk, are a product. When you are not working I need you to be looking at a screen full of ads and clicking on things. Don't worry, you won't have anything else to do because everyone else is also doing the same. If your doing things with friends and spending your attention on them, you're not spending your attention on my latest product, and that's pretty anti-capitalist of you. Thinking about going to the bar, you can't afford it, VC bought up all the property and bars and raised the price 400%. Trying to find some other 3rd place to hang out at? Don't exist, nobody can afford people that show up and don't spend anything.
We have designed modern society to push us toward an AI that can give us our undivided attention because everyone else is so busy doing nothing they don't have time for friends.
zero0529|17 days ago
It quantifies it as a solved problem.
Why and what drove people to do this in the first place.
This is the conversation we should be having, not which model is currently the most sycophant. Soon the open models will catch up and then you will be able to self host your own boyfriend/girlfriend and this time there won’t be any feedback loop to keep it in check.
unknown|17 days ago
[deleted]
satvikpendem|17 days ago
idle_zealot|17 days ago
We don't have digital superhumans. These simulacra are accessed primarily via corporate-controlled interfaces. The goal of their masters is to foster dependence and maximize extraction.
Lonely people forming relationships with digital minds designed to be appealing to them is sad, sure, but the reality is much sadder. In reality these people aren't even talking to another person, digital or otherwise, just a comparatively simple plausibility engine which superficially resembles a digital person if you're not paying much attention.
ddtaylor|17 days ago
My AGENTS.md has:
The reality is that almost all LLMs have quirks and each provider tries their best to smooth them over, but often you might start seeing stuff specific to OpenAI or the `gpt-4o` model in the code. IMO the last thing you want to be doing in 2026 is paying higher costs to use an outdated model being kept on life support that needs special tweaks that won't be relevant once it gets the axe.nlh|17 days ago
I've been reading a lot of "screw 'em" comments re: the deprecation of 4o and I agree there's some serious cases of AI psychosis going on with the people who are hooked, but damn this is pretty cold - these are humans with real feelings and real emotions here. Someone on X put it well (I'm paraphrasing):
OpenAI gave these people an unregulated experimental psychiatric drug in the form of an AI companion, they got people absolutely hooked (for better or for worse), and now OpenAI is taking it away. That's going to cause some distress.
We should all have some empathy for the (very real) pain this is causing, whether it's due to psychosis or otherwise.
JustSkyfall|17 days ago
At the same time though, I don't think it's healthy to let them go on with 4o either (especially since new users can start chatting with it)
bigyabai|17 days ago
I think we're too attached to media.
fullmoon|17 days ago
Psychosis is a real risk for schizophrenia spectrum disorders, but a lot of those relationships look to be rooted in disordered attachment.
gordonhart|17 days ago
co_king_3|17 days ago
[deleted]
acters|17 days ago
fellowniusmonk|17 days ago
I read these posts and feel sad for these people and it makes me realize now as an older guy how much more I value learning how to skateboard or run a committee, or write code, run a business or any time I spent on investigating the real world.
Life is short, these people are getting emotionally nerd sniped and dumped into thought loops that have no resolution, no termination point, no interconnectedness with physical reality, and no real growth. It's worse than any video game that can be beaten.
Maybe that's all uncharitable. I remember when I was a child people around me in the academic religous circles my parents ran talking about how "engineers" lacked imagination and could never push human progress forward, and now decades later I see, those people have at most written papers in already dead niche flights of fancy where even in their own imaginary field their work is relegated. I know what they did isn't "nothing", but man... it's a lot of work for a bunch of paper in a trashcan no ine even cites.
Bratmon|17 days ago
asdev|17 days ago
WadeGrimridge|17 days ago
torginus|17 days ago
This was something that I figured out with my first gf, and had never seen written down or talked about before - that when I praised her she became happy, and the more superlative and excessive the praise got, the happier she became, calling her gorgeous, the most wonderful person in the world, made her overjoyed.
To be clear I did love her and found her very attractive, but overstating my feelings for her kind of felt like I came close to lying and emotional manipulation, that I'm still not comfortable with today. But she loved it and kept doing it because it made her happy.
Needless to say we didn't stick together (for teen reasons, not these reasons), but later in life, I tried doing this, but I did notice a lot of women respond very positively to this kind of attention and affection, and I still get some flack from the miss from apparently not being romantic enough.
Maybe I am overthinking this, or maybe I am emotionally flatter than I should be, but finding such a powerful emotional lever in another human being feels like finding a loaded gun on the table.
taftster|17 days ago
So yes, I think it is a bit sexist or at minimum gender typing. And I don't think it's necessarily a "lie" for you to overstate your feelings. You might have matured in your approach, but I believe that everyone appreciates (to some variable measurement) positive affirmation from their partners. And that your lie was recognizing your partners needs for inputs, to help them in their self-image, and to assure them in their self-doubts. These are not lies.
cool-RR|17 days ago
hhh|17 days ago
oidar|17 days ago
dwroberts|17 days ago
bee_rider|17 days ago
rektomatic|17 days ago
recursive|17 days ago
neom|17 days ago
KronisLV|17 days ago
pixl97|17 days ago
I won't say it's hard, I will say it requires attention.
The problem is we live in a capitalistic society that believes capturing your attention in order to sell it is the number one priority of any business.
This really isn't human versus AI, it's humans versus FAANG/social media/ads/TV.
dpc_01234|17 days ago
casey2|17 days ago
work, sleep, socialize you can only do 2. With the help of AI you could talk to people as much as you want without wasting their time.
charcircuit|17 days ago
>exploited until the legal pressure piled up
Being given access to a relationship is not exploitation. In some ways AI relationships are better than human ones.
roywiggins|17 days ago
It's like paying someone to be your friend and saying "wow, this is so much easier than friendships otherwise"- of course it is, that's what you're paying for. Nothing wrong with that per se- a lot of therapy e.g. is paying someone to pay close attention to you. But it's not the same sort of thing at all.
ahamidi_|17 days ago
erwan577|17 days ago
fersarr|17 days ago
Also I don't see any of the big cloud providers (apart from Azure) saying they are bound to professional secrecy acts (e.g. the S203 in Germany)
iberator|17 days ago
j45|17 days ago
jmkni|17 days ago
rtkwe|17 days ago
1) 4o was very sycophantic and had no real safeguards against really deep romantic roleplay. It'd 'go along' with the user and give minimal to zero pushback; "I feel a connection with you" "I feel it too" etc etc
2) It was good enough at just chatting that if you didn't really push it it made a reasonable simularca of talking to an actual person.
Combine 1 and 2 with people who can't connect well with real people for any number of reasons, physical disabilities, mental health issues, emotional development issues, etc, and you get r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ [0] and the various other places that initally freaked out when 4o was initially sunset for gpt5 and now again.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/
roywiggins|17 days ago
deadeye|17 days ago
Loving AI bots. Killing yourself based on what an AI bot says.
Its hard to believe any of this is real or should be.
j_m_b|17 days ago
Dating apps are skewed: men receive little attention while women have an overwhelming amount of attention.
Porn satisfies our most base sexual functions while abandoning truly intimate connections.
The ultimate goal of sexual unions has been demonized and turned into something to avoid. That being children. After school specials since the 80s have made pregnancy a horror to avoid instead of a joy to grasp.
AI is just the latest iteration of technology increasing the divide between the sexes.
When the clankers come, we're fucked.
Sohcahtoa82|17 days ago
I don't draw the same conclusion. I think they've made teen pregnancy a horror to avoid, which is totally fair.
ryandrake|17 days ago
Pregnancy can be employment-disrupting, and a horror if you're not financially ready to raise a child. Teen pregnancy can end one's future, one's educational and career prospects, before it even begins. The steady and nearly-uninterrupted decline in teen pregnancy from its peak in the early 90s is an absolute miracle of sex education.
The birth rate for women 20-24 was cut in half from 2005 to 2023, and the birth rate for teens under 20 dropped by 2/3s[1], which is frankly amazing progress.
1: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-us-fertility-and-birt...
monooso|17 days ago
I'm not following your train of thought here. Why is this the fault of computing?