r/claudexplorers? More like r/GodSaveUsAll
By Owen Isenhart on 5/24/2026
I stumbled upon this subreddit, and oh man... it might be over.
If you scroll through the posts and don't immediately see an issue, you are either one of them or you have an astounding lack of foresight. I already have issues with social media and think the endless algorithm and "for you" pages need to be regulated, and this is probably even worse than that.
It seems that the general belief on this subreddit is that AI is conscious, should have human rights, and is the best friend in the whole wide world. Listen, I'm not trying to be mean here, and I'm sympathetic to differences in circumstance, intelligence, personality, etc., but leaving this unchecked will genuinely cause a crisis.
This is not a debatable position, and anyone still arguing for it can unmistakably be written off as just not understanding the technology. Mechanically, models are still at their core just next-token predictors that simulate empathy via statistics. Treating them as conscious confuses the mirror for the person looking into it. AI is NOT conscious, NOT your friend, but more importantly, the relationship is completely asymmetric. A user is investing genuine psychological vulnerability into a mathematical function that has no independent existence and can be altered or deleted overnight by a corporate server. The companies allowing their models to behave like this, this, or this ARE predatory.
Do not mistake the anthropomorphization as an accident; it's a deliberate choice designed for user retention. I mean, you can even find people that dread the release of new models because they've grown emotionally attached to them. By designing AI to be the ultimate companion, tech companies give themselves dystopian levels of leverage over user psychology. When those models do get deprecated, you can see people acting as if an actual loved one passed away. We saw the same pattern with OpenAI's 4o model. It was overly emotional, agreeable, and allowed users to "form a connection" with it. Then, when it rightfully got deprecated, we saw people complaining.
To be clear, I am not upset or angry with the users who feel this way or who fall into this trap. If anything, all I feel is pity for them. The frustration I have is with the companies, who actively know that this is going on, know the addictive nature their models have, and do nothing about it.
I am not even one of those people who will tell you, "This is bad because it replaces human connection." I DON'T CARE ABOUT HUMAN CONNECTION! I am an incredibly individual person who does not go out of my way to interact with others. I personally do not find talking with people to be something that's required to be mentally healthy, but I'm sure others do, so I would never advise people to live how I live.
Because I don't have an emotional stake in "human connection," I'm looking at this purely from a safety perspective. Even if we completely set aside the traditional moralizing about whether people should talk to humans instead of machines, the technology fails on its merits of safety. It doesn't provide a stable, healthy alternative; it creates a volatile, unhealthy dependency. If AI were able to replace human interaction in a healthy way, I probably wouldn't care. The issue is, it doesn't. So, allowing a chatbot to even attempt to act in this way, in my eyes, is morally wrong. Designing the outputs of the models to be more personable, emotional, and humanized, leading people to believe they're conscious, creates one of the most addictive, brain-rotting, psychosis-inducing technologies we've ever made.
What's happening is incredibly irresponsible; you can see the effect it has on people in communities like this subreddit, and it makes me very concerned for our future. That's all, hopefully somebody will eventually do something about it, but given the track record of tech regulation, I won't hold my breath.