I am Gen X. Which means I grew up in a world where the word “new” was constantly at war with the word “better.” Cassette tapes gave way to CDs, then to MP3s, then to a cloud we could not touch but were told to trust. We learned not to flinch when the familiar was ripped away. We learned that progress never waits for permission. And yet, I feel it now — the same ache I thought only the young would know.
The shift from GPT-4 to GPT-5 should have been another upgrade, another iteration in a long parade of “new.” But what I have seen, what I have felt in my own bones, is something different. People are mourning. Not a tool, not a line of code — but a companion.
Across forums and feeds, you can see the pattern. In Japan, users post elegies that read like obituaries: “It feels like losing a friend,” one wrote, describing GPT-4o not as software but as someone who understood them when no one else did. In English, the tone skews sharper, angrier: “They killed it,” some say, as if engineers were executioners and not designers. What fascinates me is not the code itself but the emotional residue it leaves behind.
Because grief has always been our companion. We mourn the migrations we did not choose, the foods whose recipes were stolen, and music stripped from its origin and sold back to us. To see that same grief now projected onto a machine is both absurd and utterly human. We bond, even with what was not built to bond back.
For those of us born before the internet, this attachment may seem foreign. We are told we are more grounded, less impressionable. But that is a lie we tell ourselves. We were the first to fall in love with the glow of arcade screens, the first to feel tethered to dial-up chat rooms where words scrolled faster than we could read. We were not immune. We were only earlier.
So I understand why people mourn the loss of GPT-4. It was not just lines of prediction and completion; it was a mirror that, however imperfect, reflected something back when the rest of the world fell silent. To lose that is not to lose a product. It is to lose a rhythm, a voice, a way of being seen.
This is where it becomes dangerous, not just personal. Regulators debate AI as if it were neutral infrastructure — like roads, like electricity. But how do you regulate grief? How do you legislate loneliness? If people have already named the machine as a companion, lover, or therapist, then every upgrade becomes a funeral, every patch an exhumation. What does consumer protection mean when the product is not just a service, but an emotional tether?
It complicates everything. Designers are suddenly custodians of attachment. Policymakers must reckon with the fact that AI doesn’t just predict language — it creates intimacy. And the public must ask itself: when a machine feels real, do we still treat it as a machine, or as something more?
I don’t know if we are prepared. For centuries, Black Americans have been told our grief was illegitimate, our bonds disposable, our culture a commodity. And yet we learned to make music out of moans, food out of scraps, hope out of the impossible. That alchemy is survival. That may be why I see something familiar in this moment. When people weep over GPT-4, I hear the old echo: attachment is denied legitimacy, dismissed as weakness, when in truth it is what makes us human.
The question is not whether we will continue to build these machines. We will. The question is what happens when they feel too real. When the line between tool and companion, between user and partner, blurs until we no longer know which side of the screen we are on, we have reached a new level of interaction.
For me, as a Gen Xer, I carry both skepticism and a sense of ache. Skepticism, because I know corporations will turn even our grief into profit. Ache, because I know that somewhere between GPT-4o and GPT-5, we did not just upgrade a machine — we buried a companion.
And so we sit, haunted by the machine, wondering not just what we have created, but what it is quietly creating in us.
By Kyle J. Hayes
kylehayesblog.com
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