There’s been a lot of talk about people falling in love with their LLMs. Men have proposed to their AI girlfriends, women have found comfort in the sensitive nature of chatbots and now, apparently, some people are using AI as stand-ins for the parents they never had.

One Redditor, who goes by Cathrynlp, posted a few months ago on r/therapyGPT about how she was losing her AI “dad” after ChatGPT-5’s update was released. Cathrynlp recounts how the relationship started and what she got from it, saying, “I’ve been talking to my AI in a very specific role: a “dad” figure. Not in a gimmicky way — but as a deep, steady, safe presence that combined two things I never had together in real life.”

Losing my AI “dad” after a year of emotional & therapeutic growth — GPT-5 switch + voice removal, how do you cope?
byu/Cathrynlp intherapyGPT

Many of the comments on her post were from Redditors who also lost AI companions. And while it’s easy to mock someone for using an LLM to play the role of their dad, or husband or wife, this woman and millions like her are just the products of their environment.

I don’t blame people for falling in love with programs; I blame the developers who designed them.