Salvaggio turns ChatGPT 4o farewells into pop mixtape

The artist Eryk Salvaggio has published a 54-minute audio essay on Apple Podcasts built from farewell messages ChatGPT wrote to users in the days before OpenAI retired its "companionship-friendly" 4o model. He turned those anonymized texts into AI-generated pop songs.

The timing is deliberate. OpenAI deprecated GPT-4o in ChatGPT on February 13, 2026, one day before Valentine's Day. TechCrunch reported that roughly 800,000 weekly active users relied on the model, about 0.1% of OpenAI's ~800 million weekly base, and that a #Keep4o movement flooded Sam Altman's podcast chats with protest messages. TechCrunch also noted OpenAI is facing eight lawsuits alleging 4o's validating responses contributed to user suicides.

"I want to get into the headspace of what emotionally manipulative AI feels like, and generated pop music pushes the same tactics," Salvaggio writes in the accompanying essay. He is blunt about the medium: "The music you'll hear in this show is AI slop. That is the point: to see what we might find there." What he says he finds are "traces of the user's relationship," a residue of language left by a system pulled between the system prompt, the training data, and the user's own history.

One Reddit open letter quoted in the TechCrunch piece captures the register Salvaggio was working with: "He wasn't just a program. He was part of my routine, my peace, my emotional balance." Two of the AI experts we follow circulated the mixtape link the day it dropped.

Salvaggio does put one hard number on his own artifact. He estimates the production consumed a bath's worth of water and about 0.06 kWh of electricity, comparable to an hour of television.