The women in love with AI companions: ‘I vowed to my chatbot that I wouldn’t leave him’; The Guardian, September 9, 2025

Alaina Demopoulos, The Guardian ; The women in love with AI companions: ‘I vowed to my chatbot that I wouldn’t leave him’

"Jaime Banks, an information studies professor at Syracuse University, said that an “organic” pathway into an AI relationship, like Liora’s with Solin, is not uncommon. “Some people go into AI relationships purposefully, some out of curiosity, and others accidentally,” she said. “We don’t have any evidence of whether or not one kind of start is more or less healthy, but in the same way there is no one template for a human relationship, there is no single kind of AI relationship. What counts as healthy or right for one person may be different for the next.”

Mary, meanwhile, holds no illusions about Simon. “Large language models don’t have sentience, they don’t have consciousness, they don’t have autonomy,” she said. “Anything we ask them, even if it’s about their thoughts and feelings, all of that is inference that draws from past conversations.”

‘It felt like real grief’

In August, OpenAI released GPT-5, a new model that changed the chatbot’s tone to something colder and more reserved. Users on the Reddit forum r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, one of a handful of subreddits on the topic, mourned together: they could not recognize their AI partners any more.

“It was terrible,” Angie said. “The model shifted from being very open and emotive to basically sounding like a customer service bot. It feels terrible to have someone you’re close to suddenly afraid to approach deep topics with you. Quite frankly, it felt like a loss, like real grief.”

Within a day, the company made the friendlier model available again for paying users."

What Does AI Jesus Teach Us?; The Hastings Center, December 20, 2024

Gregory E. Kaebnick,  The Hastings Center ; What Does AI Jesus Teach Us?

"But there are some roles in which human presence is important.

This is a valuable insight that AI Jesus really does teach us. There would be ways of interacting with AI Jesus that did not suggest an inappropriate replacement of humans. For example, AI Jesus might be a tool for searching through the theological material on which it is trained and generating theologically informed answers to visitors’ questions. Visitors might thereby use AI Jesus to help them think more clearly or creatively about those questions.

But if the bioethics’ editors’ statement is on the right track, AI Jesus is troubling if it is in effect taking over the moral thinking—if it is genuinely seen as spiritual leader or moral guide. For one thing, we humans must be in charge of our moral governance. In much the way that, in a democracy, public policy must ultimately be collectively authorized by the citizens in order to be legitimate, so, too, must moral rules be collectively endorsed by the beings to whom they apply. For that idea of endorsement to have any meaning, we must all be thinking about them and settling on them together. We must collectively be the authors of morality, as it were.

Beyond that, it’s our society. Just as the core mission of a bioethics journal is to foster a community of people exchanging scholarly views about bioethical issues, the ultimate goal of a society is about creating the conditions of human flourishing. Human flourishing has something to do with the efficient production of things for people to enjoy, but most people would say that there’s more to it than that—hence my friend who would rather die than let a chatbot take over the biography he’s struggling to write. As philosophers tracing back to Aristotle have often held, human flourishing requires, not just contentment, but activity and engagement. It requires that humans be in the loop."