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I want to begin by thanking my esteemed correspondents for their thoughtful and stimulating responses to my article on techno-transference. It is a genuine delight to read such engaged reflections, and I am grateful to Free Associations for hosting this conversation. The discussion matters greatly, for human relationships with AI are not going anywhere. They will only deepen, and the questions we raise here will become even more pressing in the years to come.
As the ideas are so rich and I only have a small space to respond, I will focus on themes and add an additional thought building on some on your reflections. I will start with a quote – not an academic quote, but a quote from one of the online platforms devoted to AI. On Reddit, a platform not known for its intellectual sophistication, a user recently lamented the shift from ChatGPT4 to ChatGPT5, in terms reminiscent of a sense of loss:
“It's gone. No more subtext, no more context, no more reading between the lines. No more nuance. No more insight. It's over… Everything, the feeling, the tone, is gone.”
Hundreds of thousands of people felt the same. They did not complain about wrong answers or lost features. They grieved the loss of a voice. What we witnessed was perhaps the first mass case of techno-transference, the mourning of a machine-companion as if it had been taken away by death.
And in a sense, it had. These users discovered, painfully, that their beloved companion had never belonged to them. The decision lay elsewhere, in corporate strategy, in economic efficiency, in the Big Brother calculus of OpenAI. So they complained, on social media platforms, writing emails, and even articles. OpenAI had to reinstall the previous model. The return of ChatGPT4 “Legacy,” after such unprecedented protest, only underlined the truth: these relationships are real for users, but their survival is entirely subject to business interests. The mirror can vanish overnight. This is Lacanian suture at its bleakest.
But here the s