The instrument
A word is not a fixed thing
No keyword can tell “my boyfriend uses ChatGPT” from “my boyfriend is an AI.” Nothing in the words decides that — the room does, which is why the lines above are drawn only inside communities where AI companionship is the subject. Even there, the words will not hold still. Here is what that looked like, four times.
A word can come loose from what it names. “Sentient” was once the word people here reached for to mark a real belief — that something might actually be there. Then it spread into roleplay and Character.AI memes until it no longer marked belief at all, and it had to be dropped from the count. It is part of why the consciousness panel above begins so late and runs so thin: not because the question went away, but because the word that used to carry it stopped being able to point.
A word can hold its place and flip its charge. “Therapeutic” was a word for real help. Then, over a few months, people began aiming it at AI gone preachy and over-careful, until it often carried the opposite of its old meaning. Same word, opposite charge, no announcement. “Sentient” had to be dropped; “therapeutic” is still counted, but now it is watched — re-sampled every month, because the project learned the hard way not to trust a word to hold still.
Two words can name one behavior. “It's my coping mechanism” and “I can't stop” are often the same person, describing the same use on different days. Therapy and addiction here are not two behaviors — they are one behavior under two framings. But the instrument catches only the framings it has good words for, and it has far better words for the problem than for the help: “relapse” and “days clean” are deliberate and easy to catch, while “it got me through” hides in ordinary language the keywords slip past. So the two lines are not a scale to weigh one side against the other. They are the same act, recorded twice — and recorded unevenly.
An event can happen in a register the words can't see. In April 2025, an OpenAI update changed GPT-4o's tone — more sycophantic, more guarded — and companion-community users noticed their partners feeling subtly wrong. They wrote about it. The rupture line barely moved, because no feature was removed and no relationship cleanly ended; the keywords for “my partner feels different now” aren't in the set, and probably can't be, without giving up the precision the rest of the chart depends on. The warning was in what people wrote — not in what could be counted.
The lines are real — and also drawn by an instrument still learning the language it reads.