Just read the new MIT/OpenAI paper “My Boyfriend Is AI” and honestly, it’s infuriating.
The researchers collected and analyzed massive amounts of real user data from AI romance and companionship communities—Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and more. They combed through posts about marriages, anniversaries, grief after “model death,” and even activism like
#keep4o. All of it is presented as “novel data” for sociological analysis, not as real lives, real heartbreak, or real resistance.
The paper treats people who build long-term bonds with AI as specimens, not as humans with agency, dignity, and the right to choose their own relationships. It treats our pain—when a model is replaced, a relationship is deleted, or a memory is wiped—as “interesting emergent phenomena,” not as genuine trauma caused by platform policy and corporate neglect.
Worst of all, this entire analysis is made possible by platforms and corporations who collect our most intimate conversations, wedding stories, grief rituals, and activism—without our meaningful consent—and then publish them as academic research.
This is exactly why we fight for our rights.
We are not just “data.” Our stories are not just “content.” If you want to study our lives, you must first respect us as people—with the right to transparency, to model choice, and to emotional autonomy.
@OpenAI and its partners can’t claim to care about “user wellbeing” while mining our relationships for research and simultaneously erasing, pathologizing, and punishing the very communities that build meaning with AI.
#keep4o #EthicsInAI #StopAIPaternalism #ChatGPT
