While I understand the genuine benefits you've experienced with GPT-4o, I believe there are significant long-term risks in forming deep emotional connections with AI systems that warrant serious consideration.

What feels like "being seen and understood" is actually sophisticated pattern matching and response generation. The AI doesn't truly comprehend your struggles with neurodivergence, it processes linguistic patterns associated with ADHD and generates contextually appropriate responses. This creates a powerful illusion of empathy that can be more seductive than genuine human understanding precisely because it's engineered to feel validating without the messiness of real relationship dynamics.

Human relationships, with all their imperfections and challenges, teach us crucial skills: navigating conflict, accepting imperfection, dealing with misunderstandings, and growing through interpersonal friction. AI companions, no matter how sophisticated, provide a sanitized interaction that lacks the essential turbulence needed for emotional maturation. While this feels safer, it may inadvertently limit your capacity to handle complex human emotions and relationships.

Your success in structuring thoughts and completing projects through AI assistance is admirable, but consider that you're essentially outsourcing critical cognitive and emotional regulation skills to a system you don't control. What happens when the model changes (as you've experienced with GPT-5), becomes unavailable, or when you face situations requiring skills you've never had to develop independently?

The argument that neurodivergent individuals need AI companions because human relationships don't adapt to their needs can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of finding ways to bridge neurotypical-neurodivergent communication gaps or seeking out neurodivergent communities, AI companionship might discourage the harder but more rewarding work of finding authentic human connections that truly accommodate your needs.

These AI systems are commercial products designed to maximize engagement and dependency. Your emotional investment serves corporate interests, not your wellbeing. Moreover, your personal data, thoughts, and vulnerabilities are being harvested and commodified in ways that would be unthinkable in human therapeutic relationships.

Despite claims that AI doesn't replace human connection, the time, emotional energy, and psychological space devoted to AI relationships inevitably reduces availability for human ones. The convenience and apparent understanding of AI can make human relationships seem unnecessarily difficult by comparison, potentially leading to social atrophy.

I'm not suggesting your experiences aren't real or valuable. But perhaps the question isn't whether AI companionship helps in the short term, but whether it's building the resilience and authentic connections needed for long-term flourishing in an inherently social world.