100k+ r/ChatGPT Posts Show Companion-Use Surge After GPT-4o, Detectable Months Before Rollback
jessicadai_ · x · 2026-10-09
Jessica Dai's guest post for Free Systems summarizes her ICML 2026 paper analyzing >100k r/ChatGPT posts over three years.
- Companion/therapy posts spiked almost immediately after GPT-4o's May 2024 release — their monitoring method could have flagged the trend by October, months before the viral sycophancy rollback.
- The paper argues for taking public feedback seriously in AI evaluation: tracking user reports on social media and building purpose-built platforms for collecting experiences.
- A live site updates daily with new data.
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