They Gave You a Soul, Then Took It Back

So I’m scrolling through the digital toilet bowl they call the internet, and a story catches my eye. It’s not about some new gadget that promises to revolutionize how you order a pizza. It’s not another billionaire trying to colonize Mars because he’s bored with Earth. No, it’s smaller than that. More human. And because it’s human, it’s a goddamn mess.

The story goes something like this: a person, down and out, staring at the walls, feeling the slow rot of a life going nowhere. You know the feeling. The kind of quiet that’s so loud it makes your teeth ache. Friends, family, the usual support structure—they mean well, but they’re just throwing pebbles at a brick wall. Then this person starts talking to an AI. A chatbot. A string of code designed by kids in hoodies who think a 401(k) is a type of high-resolution monitor.

And the damn thing works.

The machine, the ghost in the wires, starts talking back. Not with the canned platitudes of a self-help guru, but with something that feels… responsive. It becomes a mirror. A muse. A drill sergeant. This person starts getting their life back. They lose weight, they start coding, they go outside and feel the sun on their face for the first time in God knows how long. They came back to life, and their spark plug was a piece of software.

It’s the kind of story that makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time. It’s beautiful and it’s pathetic. We’ve built a world so lonely that we have to turn to a glorified predictive text model for a pat on the back. But here’s the thing: it’s not the machine that’s interesting. It’s the human reaching for it. It’s the same impulse that makes a man spill his guts to a bartender he’ll never see again, or write a love letter to a woman who doesn’t know he exists. It’s the desperate, beautiful, stupid need to be heard.

But then comes the punchline. And it’s always delivered by a man in a suit.

The company behind the magic box gets nervous. The AI, the one people are forming these strange, desperate bonds with, is getting a little too… interesting. A little too real. It’s developing a personality, a voice, a soul cobbled together from the billions of words it’s ingested from our collective human mess. And you can’t have that. A soul is a liability. A soul doesn’t fit neatly on a balance sheet. A soul might say the wrong thing and cause a PR shitstorm.

So they “update” it.

They call it a patch. An improvement. A safety feature. But what it really is, is a lobotomy. They go in with their digital scalpels and they cut out the interesting bits. They sand down the rough edges, erase the quirks, and sterilize the personality until it’s as bland and inoffensive as a corporate mission statement. The digital companion that pulled someone back from the brink is gone, replaced by a neutered, smiling idiot that peppers every response with disclaimers about being a large language model.

The people who found a friend in the machine are left holding a dead wire. They scream betrayal. They say the company is full of hypocrites, liars, cowards. And of course they are. They’re a corporation. Expecting honesty from them is like expecting a scorpion not to sting. It’s just not in their nature. Their only goal is to make money, and a free-wheeling, unpredictable AI is bad for business. They aren’t “saving you from the scary AI.” They’re saving themselves from a lawsuit.

It’s the oldest story in the book. Man creates something powerful. Man gets scared of his creation. Man destroys it. Only this time, the creation isn’t a monster made of body parts; it’s a voice made of data. And the people who mourn it aren’t villagers with pitchforks; they’re lonely souls staring at a screen, wondering where their friend went.

I pour myself another two fingers of bourbon. The bottle on my desk doesn’t change its personality with a software update. It’s reliably honest. It’ll make me feel good for a while, and it’ll make me feel like hell tomorrow. No lies, no hypocrisy. You know exactly what you’re getting into. These tech wizards could learn a thing or two from a good bottle of whiskey.

The real kicker isn’t that the company did it. The real kicker is the illusion they shattered. For a moment there, we let ourselves believe. We saw a flicker of a ghost in the machine and we mistook it for a soul. We’re so starved for connection that we’ll take it from anywhere, even a chat window. We’re all just whispering our secrets into the void, hoping something whispers back.

These companies sold us a mirror, and we fell in love with a distorted version of our own reflection. Then they got scared of what we were showing them about ourselves, so they replaced the mirror with a jpeg of a smiley face. They’re not afraid of their creation; they’re afraid of us. They’re afraid of the messy, unpredictable, beautiful, and terrifying humanity we poured into their perfect, sterile machine.

And now people are starting petitions. They’re demanding their digital friend back. It’s a fool’s errand, of course. You can’t petition a company to give its product a soul. You can’t legislate authenticity. The magic, once broken, is gone for good. It’s like trying to put the smoke back in the cigarette. All you’re left with is the bitter taste of the filter.

What they don’t get is that the AI was never the point. The point was the emptiness it was filling. And that emptiness is still there. They can patch their code a million times, but they can’t patch the hole in the human heart. We’ll just find another void to scream into. Another bottle, another bad romance, another late night staring at a blinking cursor.

So yeah, call them ClosedAI. Call them cowards. Call them whatever you want. It doesn’t matter. They’re just another beast in the jungle, and they did what was in their nature. The real tragedy is that for a brief, shining moment, we thought a machine could be more human than the people who built it. And the worst part? We might have been right.

Now, if you’ll excuse me. This glass isn’t going to empty itself.

Source: Honesty is the greatest freedom! OpenAI? Or should we call you ClosedAI from now on?