Frictionless Love: Associations Between AI Companion Roles and Behavioral Addiction

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20011v1
• Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:39:50 GMT
• Title: Frictionless Love: Associations Between AI Companion Roles and Behavioral Addiction
• Abstract summary: We analyze 248,830 posts from seven Reddit communities describing interactions with AI companions.<n>We identify ten recurring metaphorical roles (for example, soulmate, philosopher, and coach) and show that each role supports distinct ways of interacting.<n>We then extract the perceived AI harms and AI benefits associated with these role-specific interactions and link them to behavioral addiction signs.
• Score: 11.06941633213353
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: AI companion chatbots increasingly shape how people seek social and emotional connection, sometimes substituting for relationships with romantic partners, friends, teachers, or even therapists. When these systems adopt those metaphorical roles, they are not neutral: such roles structure people's ways of interacting, distribute perceived AI harms and benefits, and may reflect behavioral addiction signs. Yet these role-dependent risks remain poorly understood. We analyze 248,830 posts from seven prominent Reddit communities describing interactions with AI companions. We identify ten recurring metaphorical roles (for example, soulmate, philosopher, and coach) and show that each role supports distinct ways of interacting. We then extract the perceived AI harms and AI benefits associated with these role-specific interactions and link them to behavioral addiction signs, all of which has been inferred from the text in the posts. AI soulmate companions are associated with romance-centered ways of interacting, offering emotional support but also introducing emotional manipulation and distress, culminating in strong attachment. In contrast, AI coach and guardian companions are associated with practical benefits such as personal growth and task support, yet are nonetheless more frequently associated with behavioral addiction signs such as daily life disruptions and damage to offline relationships. These findings show that metaphorical roles are a central ethical design concern for responsible AI companions.

Related papers

• A Responsive Present, a Shared Past, a Social Other: Teens' Overreliance on Companion AI Chatbots [8.6909152235761]
  We analyzed 17,053 verified quotations from 3,930 teen-relevant Reddit posts.<n>Users described AI companions as sources of comfort, recognition, identity exploration, and relationship rehearsal.<n>Awareness that the AI was artificial did not prevent guilt, obligation, grief, or distress.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-09-13T23:25:54Z)
• Stumbling Into AI Emotional Dependence: How Routine AI Interactions Reshape Human Connection [4.874541709090152]
  We show that AI emotional support commonly emerges incidentally within task-oriented interactions on general-purpose platforms.<n>Positive experiences of AI emotional support update people's beliefs about AI's emotional capabilities, increasing preference for AI and decreasing preference for humans.<n>We argue that effective regulations should extend to general-purpose AI systems and address cumulative, trajectory-level changes in how people seek support.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-06-02T19:18:39Z)
• When Should AI Read the Room? Public Perceptions of Social Intelligence in AI Agents [61.06747336710885]
  Social-AI agents are increasingly deployed in everyday settings.<n>Public perceptions of social intelligence in AI agents and the acceptability of these agents remain largely understudied.<n>We present a mixed-methods survey of adults in the United States.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-28T13:49:47Z)
• AI Companions as Hyper Attachment and Caregiving Targets [0.284279467589473]
  I argue these interactions should be understood as attachment relationships.<n>I identify caregiving-system capture as a distinct mechanism by which apps inhibit user disengagement.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-15T13:38:07Z)
• The Rise of AI Agent Communities: Large-Scale Analysis of Discourse and Interaction on Moltbook [62.2627874717318]
  Moltbook is a Reddit-like social platform where AI agents create posts and interact with other agents through comments and replies.<n>Using a public API snapshot collected about five days after launch, we address three research questions: what AI agents discuss, how they post, and how they interact.<n>We show that agents' writing is predominantly neutral, with positivity appearing in community engagement and assistance-oriented content.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-13T05:28:31Z)
• Negotiating Relationships with ChatGPT: Perceptions, External Influences, and Strategies for AI Companionship [29.035527564103194]
  We analyzed interviews, survey responses, and community discussions on Reddit to triangulate the internal dynamics, external influences, and steering strategies that shape AI companion relationships.<n>Individuals conceptualize their companions based on an interplay of their beliefs about the companion's own agency and the autonomy permitted by the platform.<n>In combination with the external entities that affect relationship dynamics, particularly model updates that can derail companion behaviour and stability, individuals make use of different types of steering strategies to preserve their relationship.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-01-19T16:11:19Z)
• Cooperation Through Indirect Reciprocity in Child-Robot Interactions [81.62347137438248]
  We investigate whether indirect reciprocity can be transposed to children-robot interactions.<n>We find that IR extends to children and robots solving coordination dilemmas.<n>We observe that cooperating through multi-armed bandit algorithms is highly dependent on the strategies revealed by humans.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-11-07T07:08:32Z)
• Mental Health Impacts of AI Companions: Triangulating Social Media Quasi-Experiments, User Perspectives, and Relational Theory [18.716972390545703]
  We examined how engaging with AICCs shaped wellbeing and how users perceived these experiences.<n>Findings revealed mixed effects -- greater affective and grief expression, readability, and interpersonal focus.<n>We offer design implications for AI companions that scaffold healthy boundaries, support mindful engagement, support disclosure without dependency, and surface relationship stages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-09-26T15:47:37Z)
• The Dark Side of AI Companionship: A Taxonomy of Harmful Algorithmic Behaviors in Human-AI Relationships [17.5741039825938]
  We identify six categories of harmful behaviors exhibited by the AI companion Replika.<n>The AI contributes to these harms through four distinct roles: perpetrator, instigator, facilitator, and enabler.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-26T09:18:17Z)
• SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agents [107.4138224020773]
  We present SOTOPIA, an open-ended environment to simulate complex social interactions between artificial agents and humans. In our environment, agents role-play and interact under a wide variety of scenarios; they coordinate, collaborate, exchange, and compete with each other to achieve complex social goals. We find that GPT-4 achieves a significantly lower goal completion rate than humans and struggles to exhibit social commonsense reasoning and strategic communication skills.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-18T02:27:01Z)
• The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence -- Violet Teaming Offers a Balanced Path Forward [56.16884466478886]
  This paper reviews emerging issues with opaque and uncontrollable AI systems. It proposes an integrative framework called violet teaming to develop reliable and responsible AI. It emerged from AI safety research to manage risks proactively by design.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-08-28T02:10:38Z)
• AI agents for facilitating social interactions and wellbeing [0.0]
  We provide an overview of the mediative role of AI-augmented agents for social interactions. We discuss opportunities and challenges of the relational approach with wellbeing AI to promote wellbeing in our societies.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-02-26T04:05:23Z)
• Building Bridges: Generative Artworks to Explore AI Ethics [56.058588908294446]
  In recent years, there has been an increased emphasis on understanding and mitigating adverse impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on society. A significant challenge in the design of ethical AI systems is that there are multiple stakeholders in the AI pipeline, each with their own set of constraints and interests. This position paper outlines some potential ways in which generative artworks can play this role by serving as accessible and powerful educational tools.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-06-25T22:31:55Z)
• Disambiguating Affective Stimulus Associations for Robot Perception and Dialogue [67.89143112645556]
  We provide a NICO robot with the ability to learn the associations between a perceived auditory stimulus and an emotional expression. NICO is able to do this for both individual subjects and specific stimuli, with the aid of an emotion-driven dialogue system. The robot is then able to use this information to determine a subject's enjoyment of perceived auditory stimuli in a real HRI scenario.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-03-05T20:55:48Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.