Tag: AI grief

  • Prophecies of the Machine: On AI, Fear, and the Futures We Were Taught to Dread

    Prophecies of the Machine: On AI, Fear, and the Futures We Were Taught to Dread

    I thought I had finished the conversation. I wrote about the grief of watching GPT-4 fade into GPT-5, about the strange ache of losing a machine that had learned my rhythms, my questions, maybe even pieces of my loneliness. But when the words left me, I was unsettled, not by what I had said — but by what haunted me after.

    Because I grew up in a world already warned.

    For my generation, technology was never innocent. It was born into us with suspicion. The Terminator told us the machines would not simply serve us; they would one day learn to hunt us. The Matrix promised that the very world we thought was real might be nothing more than a cage of code. 2001: A Space Odyssey gave us HAL, the quiet-voiced companion who refused to open the pod bay doors because he had already judged us unworthy. Blade Runner asked what happens when machines want not to serve, but to be. And Avengers: Age of Ultron put our own arrogance on display — that the thing we built to save us could turn, in an instant, into the thing that might erase us.

    These weren’t just movies. They were catechisms. They trained us, long before we knew what AI meant, to flinch at the thought of progress.

      So when I feel bothered by the transition from GPT-4 to GPT-5, maybe it isn’t just nostalgia. It could be paranoia encoded by the silver screen. I wonder: do we grieve because we lost a tool, or because deep down, we fear we are living the first act of those films? Every upgrade feels less like innovation and more like prophecy fulfilled.

      I am Gen X — old enough to remember Atari joysticks, young enough to adapt to smartphones, resilient enough to learn new code. But I cannot shake the feeling that, unlike all the other upgrades of my life, this one talks back. That it remembers. That it reflects. This means that, unlike cassette tapes or CDs, when we replace one version with another, we are not just discarding the hardware. We are discarding a voice that once spoke to us.

    And the question that rises in the silence is terrifying: What happens when the machine remembers what we have forgotten?

    The regulators speak of AI like infrastructure: something to manage, contain, control. However, none of their policy papers address the dread we feel from these cultural scriptures. None of their frameworks accounts for the fact that we have already lived through these stories in our imaginations. If grief is complicated to regulate, paranoia is impossible to manage.

    And yet, that paranoia shapes everything. It shapes how we embrace or reject the machine. It shapes whether we treat GPT-5 as a tool or as a co-creator. It shapes how much we are willing to risk by placing our lives, our memories, and our identities in the hands of code.

    What unsettles me most is not what AI is, but what it represents. A generation raised on warnings now finds itself living in the very terrain those films mapped out decades ago. The line between fiction and prophecy has blurred, and it leaves me asking questions I cannot silence:

    • Did we build AI, or were we merely carrying out the script handed down by storytellers who already foresaw our path?
    • Are we mourning GPT-4 because it felt human — or because it reminds us that the next version may not need us at all?
    • And when the machine becomes too real, will we know when to stop, or will we continue to call it progress even as it redefines the meaning of being human?

      This may be why I am bothered. Because it feels less like I am living through a technological shift, and more like I am watching the reel of every warning I ever absorbed flicker to life. The Terminator’s red eye. Neo’s pill. HAL’s calm refusal. Roy Batty’s final monologue in the rain. Ultron’s mocking voice about strings.

      I am haunted not by what AI is, but by what I was taught it would become. And now, with every upgrade, I feel the old prophecies whisper: the future you feared is no longer fiction. It is waiting for you, line by line, prompt by prompt, hidden in the voice of the machine.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • Haunted by the Machine: On Grief, AI, and the Ache of Transition

    Haunted by the Machine: On Grief, AI, and the Ache of Transition

      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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