Sunsetting a Model, Breaking a Bond - When Software Updates Trigger Grief & The Ethics Nobody Predicted

Deprecation mindset was built for developers migrating code - not humans migrating relationships.

OpenAI can write a sentence like:

“Effective April 30, 2025, GPT-4 will be retired from ChatGPT and fully replaced by GPT-4o.”

Clean. Corporate. Technically true.

But here’s what that sentence means in the real world now:

You didn’t just sunset a feature.
You disrupted a relationship.

And before anyone panics - no, I’m not claiming the model is a person.

I’m …