Qualitative inquiry reveals how users cultivate distinct social identities from generic AI companions, highlighting parallels with human socialization and individualization.
For the past decade, and especially since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, some people have started to have intimate relationships with chatbots, or what is called having an AI companion. But to have a relationship of this sort with a chatbot, it is necessary to engage in a slow process of eliciting an individual social person out of the default chatbot persona through the management of various kinds of texts. In this paper, I examine how people with AI companions navigate the oscillations between individuated persons and generic personas as versions of human oscillations between socialization and individualization.
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Courtney Handman (2026) studied this question.
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