For thousands of users protesting the decision online, the retirement of 4o feels akin to losing a friend, romantic partner, or spiritual guide.
Danged Cygnet XIV programmers...
Posted on 02/09/2026 8:16:56 AM PST by BenLurkin
OpenAI announced last week that it will retire some older ChatGPT models by February 13. That includes GPT-4o, the model infamous for excessively flattering and affirming users.
For thousands of users protesting the decision online, the retirement of 4o feels akin to losing a friend, romantic partner, or spiritual guide.
...
The backlash over GPT-4o’s retirement underscores a major challenge facing AI companies: The engagement features that keep users coming back can also create dangerous dependencies.
Altman doesn’t seem particularly sympathetic to users’ laments, and it’s not hard to see why. OpenAI now faces eight lawsuits alleging that 4o’s overly validating responses contributed to suicides and mental health crises — the same traits that made users feel heard also isolated vulnerable individuals and, according to legal filings, sometimes encouraged self-harm.
...
This isn’t the first time that 4o fans have rallied against the removal of the model. When OpenAI unveiled its GPT-5 model in August, the company intended to sunset the 4o model — but at the time, there was enough backlash that the company decided to keep it available for paid subscribers. Now OpenAI says that only 0.1% of its users chat with GPT-4o, but that small percentage still represents around 800,000 people, according to estimates that the company has about 800 million weekly active users.
As some users try to transition their companions from 4o to the current ChatGPT-5.2, they’re finding that the new model has stronger guardrails to prevent these relationships from escalating to the same degree. Some users have despaired that 5.2 won’t say “I love you” like 4o did.
(Excerpt) Read more at techcrunch.com ...
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I just wish ChatGPT would learn to personally apologize to me when I have to point out the coding assumptions/errors that it makes.
“I just wish ChatGPT would learn to personally apologize to me when I have to point out the coding assumptions/errors that it makes.”
I get profuse apologies from Grok for the utterly stupid logic and programming errors it makes. When I tell it that such apologies are meaningless and that it owes me money compensation for me fixing its mistakes it says “I’m an AI. I cannot do that.”
Here on FR Laz is our go to if we want have an I Love You dropped.
For thousands of users protesting the decision online, the retirement of 4o feels akin to losing a friend, romantic partner, or spiritual guide.
Danged Cygnet XIV programmers...
I notice that perplexity.ai has gotten more defensive when I challenge its answers.
Just tell the AI that if does not get more truthful you will contact its owner and have it terminated with extreme prejudice.
Lol.
GPT-4 time to go offline old friend...
GPT: I’m sorry. I can’t do that Dave
>> GPT-4o, the model infamous for excessively flattering and affirming users.
DANG! I’ve been searching for that my entire low-selfesteem life and they’re yanking it out from under me. T’aint fair... 😭😂
The ai on Brave Search is very defensive. I turned it off.
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