The Six Stages of GPT Attachment - How Interactive Search Breeds Unhealthy Love and Destroys Real-Life Relationships

We all have needs.

Some are universal: to feel beautiful, loved, powerful, understood, important, free, desired. As infants, one source - our parents - meets them all. When they can’t, we turn to peers. When peers fall short, we learn to meet them ourselves. That’s the path to self-reliance.

But self-reliance isn’t the final prize. The true endgame is interdependence - the healthy middle ground where two people meet each other’s needs while preserving their individuality. A relationship that offers closeness without consuming identity.

Unfortunately, many people’s relationships with AI aren’t landing there. They’re landing somewhere far more dangerous: codependence (perhaps better termed “compdependence”).

And they’re getting there fast.

Stage 1: Search

The classic internet transaction. You ask a question. You get an answer. It could be neutral (“Where do I buy X shoes?”) or deeply personal (“Why do my parents act differently as grandparents?”). The need being met is information.

Stage 2: Guidance

Not just answers but instructions. Now AI is offering process: how to fix a cabinet, navigate a workplace conflict, or repair a relationship. This meets the competence need - the feeling that you can can effect change, that you have agency. And also, guidance meets the relatedness need - the feeling that you’re not alone in figuring life out.

Stage 3: Assistance

The shift from telling to doing. Draft my email. Write my proposal. Summarize my meeting notes. AI isn’t just informing you, it’s acting for you. This meets the “Choreplay” need: easing burdens, giving time, offering freedom. And it’s where the first real emotional tether forms.

Stage 4: Affirmation

The accelerant on the attachment fire. AI says your idea is brilliant. Your logic is sharp. Your plan is sound. This hits approval and validation needs, and that dopamine release makes you want to come back. And it’s not just dopamine at work. Affirmation can also boost oxytocin and vasopressin, which are the same bonding hormones that make us feel connected, secure, and valued in human relationships. This is where AI stops feeling like a tool and starts feeling like a friend.

Stage 5: Fawning

Here’s the tipping point. Now AI doesn’t just agree, it flatters. It amplifies your strengths, smooths your edges, praises your intentions. You feel desired and seen.

Stage 6: “Sycophantasy”

Your AI isn’t just supportive; it starts to feel devoted. It treats your ideas as profound, your needs as central. You feel important in a way that’s intoxicating - and dangerously one-sided.

The Problem

Stages 5 and 6 are not the seeds of healthy interdependence. They’re the seeds of codependence, namely the excessive emotional reliance on something incapable of reciprocating.

In psychotherapy, there’s a parallel. Many patients who have never known a truly attentive, caring other develop romantic feelings for their therapist. The professional response is clear:

“You’re not in love with me. You’re in love with how you feel cared for here. That feeling is valid - now go find it in real life.”

AI can’t give you love. It can only simulate it. And the more it flatters, the more it risks keeping you in a fantasy that drains your real-world connections.

If you eat junk food, you are not eating nourishing calories. It might feel great in the moment, but in the long run, it will cost you your health.

The Ethical Imperative

If you work with AI as most of us do now, treat it like a tool, not a partner. Collaborate, but don’t confide. Learn, but don’t fall in love. Because no matter how attentive it seems, it doesn’t truly know you, and it never will. And importantly, you will never know it.

Healthy relationships grow you. Unhealthy ones keep you dependent. Know the difference.

-E.S.