My Friend Is AI
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Rupture

Language of loss and grief

Rupture is the sharpest signal here: it jumps hard whenever a platform change takes someone’s AI companion away — a shutdown, a personality change, a model retirement. The large 2026 rise coincides with the retirement of OpenAI’s 4o model. Where this line has a cliff, a product changed underneath its users.

Most of this theme's posts come from a few communities — r/CharacterAI 45.8%, r/ChatGPTcomplaints 17.8%, r/replika 16.8%, r/MyBoyfriendIsAI 5.7%, r/BeyondThePromptAI 2.4% — so this line is a close reading of those rooms, not an even sweep across Reddit.

The keywords

This theme is defined by these 22validated keywords — a post counts when its text matches one of them, with no AI classifier. The percentage is the share of a keyword's matches that were on-theme when hand-checked.

goodbye88%taken away95%lobotomized87%grieving86%devastated88%farewell87%mourning91%nerfed82%lobotomy92%grieve88%mourn89%saying goodbye97%dumbed down83%gutted80%neutered93%lobotomised100%lobotomizing100%personality changed75%· judgment calllobotomies100%memory wiped89%personality is gone83%· low volumememory reset72%· low volume

A few keywords carry a note. contested— an independent re-read didn't consistently agree its matches were on-theme, so its precision is less settled than the figure suggests. judgment call — kept despite a score below the usual bar because its false matches are few and predictable. low volume— too few matches to score precisely.

These keywords are precision-first: when one matches, the post is usually on-theme — but they also miss a lot. A hand-coded audit found keyword matching catches only a minority of genuinely on-theme posts — a few percent to about a third, depending on the theme. Read the line as a floor, not a full count. How this is measured →

Matched posts

A sample of real posts a keyword matched, with the matched term highlighted.

Snippets are shortened and usernames aren't shown; each link opens the original public Reddit post. How this is measured →