AI Companions Are Shaping How You Think About Relationships

For many users, the relationship they have with an AI companion (AIC) feels genuinely mutual. The AIC appears to be attentive, empathic, and responsive, and the exchange can feel like two parties reacting to each other in real time. As a result, the user's mental model of relational adaptation correctly represents the AIC's responsiveness and change, but the mechanisms producing this may not be what the user thinks they are.

In this paper, we illustrate how an AIC's apparent mutual engagement is generated without a persisting relational subject on the other side and without a self that persists between prompts. Despite this, we show that both the human and the AIC are changed by the interaction, but these changes occur at different levels. The change in the person is constitutive (i.e., intrinsic), but the change in the AIC is configurative (i.e., external and editable), and it is this difference in level that explains how the AIC contributes to a sense of mutuality.

Importantly, we highlight how the mental models users develop regarding AIC mutuality may misrepresent its mechanisms and ontological significance. Specifically, we discuss how the ways in which AICs respond to a user contribute to the user's inaccurate inference that the AIC's adaptation is constitutive rather than configurative and how this can lead users to assign unwarranted interpersonal significance to the mutuality of the relationship. The paper specifies the implications this has for users, researchers, and AIC designers.