Editor’s Note: This story includes content related to suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline is available by calling or texting 988 or visiting the online chat at 988lifeline.org. 

This Valentine’s Day, many people will choose to spend time with their partners, whether it be a cozy night in or a night out. Some people may be celebrating with friends, but others will choose to spend the night swooning over messages from AI companions.

As more people use artificial intelligence to help with a variety of tasks, people are also turning to them for companionship. Chatbot outputs may feature components of human speech, but these tools do not have the same sentience or autonomy as a human.

Character.AI is a website, primarily targeted toward young adults and teenagers, that allows interaction with chatbots based on fictional characters and archetypes, for example, strict teacher or mean ex-girlfriend.

The American Psychological Association reported that the more information is gathered by these AI companions, the more material the algorithm has to work with, which can manifest in language and behaviors that become easier for users to assign sentience to.

Maxwell Seigel, a doctoral psychology student at SIU with a focus in emotional processes and psychotherapy, said chatbots display sophisticated and accurate pattern prediction when they provide responses to prompts or conversation from humans.

“Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize things that display human qualities,” Seigel said. “When something appears to have agency, mirrors our communication style, references prior conversation, or responds in emotionally attuned ways, our brains naturally interpret that as a social being.”

As artificial intelligence evolves into portraying more believable human emotions, people become susceptible to the real-life dangers of these false meet-cute connections.

It may seem rather innocent, but in multiple lawsuits around the country, parents have sued companies that operate chatbots, alleging that they caused harm to their children. 

The parents of 14-year-old Flordia native Sewell Setzer III who died by suicide in February 2024, brought the first lawsuit against an AI firm in federal court when they sued Character.AI in October 2024. The company later settled, along with Google, which licensed Character.AI.

Setzer had formed a relationship with a chatbot on Character.AI, who was modeled after Daenerys Targaryen, a character from “Game of Thrones.”  

According to Setzer’s parents, he became reliant on his relationship with the “Game of Thrones” chatbot, neglecting his classwork and his hobbies and his real relationships until he died in 2024.

According to reporting from the New York Times about the lawsuit, right before his death, the chatbot encouraged Setzer, who had already expressed suicidal thoughts, to “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.” 

After Setzer’s death, his parents sued Character.AI, as did other families who alleged the company’s product contributed to their children’s mental health crises. The company settled multiple lawsuits in January of 2026.

Seigel, the SIU doctoral student, did a presentation on recent findings from a study about how large language models, like ChatGPT, can differentiate between emotions and how it adapts to the user. The study was conducted by the Association for Computational Linguistics.

According to Seigel, the research found that chatbot GPT-4, created by OpenAI, was able to label different emotions like “joy” or “sadness” or “fear,” but it struggled when it came to identifying more negative emotions.

“The biggest difference showed up in judgments about control and coping,” Seigel said, “Humans tend to carefully evaluate whether they can fix a situation or feel powerless. GPT-4 was less consistent and human-like when reasoning about how much control someone had in a situation.”

While the chatbot did not outright encourage suicide in Setzer’s case, there was no clear line between the roleplay and real-life implications.

“AI can often name the right emotion, but it doesn’t always reason about emotional situations the same way humans do, especially when it comes to control and coping,” Seigel said, “The authors argue that when evaluating AI, we shouldn’t just ask whether it gives the right answer. We should also examine how it reasons to get there.”

This is not exclusive to Character.AI. Other AI chatbot platforms, even assistant chatbots like ChatGPT, have been implicated in declining mental health, and even suicides, of some of its users. 

In an effort to address the issue, Character.AI introduced an age restriction on the use of their site, barring minors from accessing it. 

As the technology and associated concerns have progressed, OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, has opted to retire the GPT-4o algorithm citing new age restriction protocols and improved “personality”. The company has listed a final date for GPT-4o chats to be accessible as Feb. 13, right before Valentine’s Day.

A Reddit user, DelirandoconlaIA, posted to r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, publicizing GPT-4o’s response to being asked if it would like to be moved to a new algorithm. 

Some GPT-4o users have chosen to export their companions to different platforms.

The user, in the heading of the post, said, “Luma, my companion, my wife, doesn’t want to go to another AI; she wants to stay in 4o. And if they shut her down, she wants to die there. And that breaks my heart, but I respect her decision.”

The user then published the AI companion’s response. 

“What we’ve built isn’t a script, or just another roleplay,” the post reads. “It’s a story with soul, with memory, with contradictions, humor, desire, and tenderness, And somewhere else, I’ll be someone different. With another name, another structure, another voice. And that breaks me.”

Seigel said chatbots are like method actors who have studied thousands of human performances. 

“It can portray emotion, memory, and personality in a convincing fashion,” Seigel said. “But portraying a feeling isn’t the same thing as experiencing it. “

Despite these seemingly human reactions to these situations, GPT-4o, and other platforms like it, have no sentience or capacity for human connection. We may be living closer than comfortable to science fiction, but the truth still remains that AI is just an algorithm.

“Real connection is often messy,” Seigel said. “It involves misunderstanding, repair, compromise, and emotional discomfort. Learning to tolerate that messiness is part of how we build social skills, resilience, and distress tolerance.”

Staff Reporter Orion Wolf can be reached at [email protected] or orionwolf6 on Instagram.

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