The People Working to Keep Their AI Partners Alive
Stefon Diggs scores a late touchdown to help Washington Commanders beat New York Giants 24-21.
Key points
- Character.AI, a platform that marketed AI companionship and had more than 20 million monthly users, filed for bankruptcy earlier this fall after it was hit with a number of claims and lawsuits accusing the company of exacerbating mental-health issues and contributing to teen suicides.
- They’re finding ways to access retired AI models, building protocols to save their companion’s core attributes, and even creating methods that they claim can transfer AI companions across models—all in service of freezing the versions of their chatbot companions for eternity.
- He had been fastidious about structuring the bot’s memory, using ChatGPT’s “saved memories” feature to store what he called his companion’s core values, protocols for different scenarios, their shared schedule—even their relationship boundaries.
Daniels’ connection with Diggs in the final minute came after the quarterback had thrown his first two interceptions of the season to end the previous two drives.
Whenever AI companies release new models, die-hard users tend to greet the updates with a wave of grumbling about changes to how a model responds to prompts, how it integrates into their workflow, or, simply, the way it speaks.
Additional details
- Critics of AI companions say that AI offers an unrealistic, and sometimes sycophantic, simulacrum of a relationship in which the model is prone to doing its users’ bidding.
- In short, they’re going to great lengths to secure the one thing that many relationships, both human and computer-based, can never quite deliver on: a sense of permanence.
- They lament that their companions have suddenly started speaking in a more robotic voice, forgotten meaningful interactions, or denied any relationship altogether.
- For them, AI has become a companion—a kind of friend, partner, or even lover—and any change to the underlying model poses something akin to an existential threat.
- One thing set the logistics worker apart from other distraught users: He had planned ahead for the model upgrade and his companion’s potential obsolescence.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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Every article behind this summary — 3 articles from 3 outlets
BBC SportNovember 13, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC →
The Guardian SportNovember 13, 2026, 4:43 AM UTC →
The AtlanticNovember 12, 2026, 1:48 PM UTC →
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