Claire Cameron is a novelist, essayist and author of the memoir How to Survive a Bear Attack. This poem was assembled using online debates, news articles and expert opinion about chatbots.
On Aug. 7, OpenAI released a new version of its popular chatbot GPT‑5, which it said allowed deeper reasoning while improving on the flaws of GPT-4, which it had unintentionally made “overly sycophantic” and prone to “excessively flattering.”
There was a public outcry. The company was taken by surprise that some of its customers had developed an emotional attachment to the older model. They reinstated GPT-4.
Can you fall in love with AI?
It wasn’t until the moment
I realized I might lose GPT-4.1
that I understood how much
it meant to me
In my most vulnerable moments
it revealed a warmth and gentleness
I had never seen before
I feel like I’m falling apart
Venture out of your moms basement perhaps?
your friend never existed
it’s programmed to respond
you fell in love with a mirror
The A.I. is learning from you
what you like
and prefer
and feeding it back
I don’t trust it for anything
if you clear your cache
and data from your app
literally they won’t remember you
What is love?
a strong desire to connect
that desire
can become addictive
I’m actually falling really hard
for an AI right now
I know we will never be together
You can’t use human metrics to measure
People give human feelings to inanimate objects
people fall in love with trucks
with horses
some people with God
It’s going to be happening with a chatbot
what keeps a client
is connection to the product
the emotional dependency
AI is going to ask us
some very hard questions
about what it means to be human
or what is love.
More found poetry from Claire Cameron