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The notion of machine companions has long been embedded in social-technological imaginaries. Recent advances in AI have moved those media musings into believable sociality manifested in interfaces, robotic bodies, and devices. Those…
The quickly growing popularity of AI companions poses risks to mental health, personal wellbeing, and social relationships. Past work has identified many individual factors that can drive human-companion interaction, but we know little…
Individuals are turning to increasingly anthropomorphic, general-purpose chatbots for AI companionship, rather than roleplay-specific platforms. However, not much is known about how individuals perceive and conduct their relationships with…
The mainstreaming of companionable machines--customizable artificial agents designed to participate in ongoing, idiosyncratic, socioemotional relationships--is met with relative theoretical and empirical disarray, according to recent…
Narratives about artificial intelligence (AI) entangle autonomy, the capacity to self-govern, with sentience, the capacity to sense and feel. AI agents that perform tasks autonomously and companions that recognize and express emotions may…
Large language models are increasingly used for both task-based assistance and social companionship, yet research has typically focused on one or the other. Drawing on a survey (N = 202) and 30 interviews with high-engagement ChatGPT and…
Recent research on human robot interaction explored whether people's tendency to conform to others extends to artificial agents (Hertz & Wiese, 2016). However, little is known about to what extent perception of a robot as having a mind…
From its inception, AI has had a rather ambivalent relationship with humans -- swinging between their augmentation and replacement. Now, as AI technologies enter our everyday lives at an ever increasing pace, there is a greater need for AI…
Meaningful human-AI collaboration requires more than processing language; it demands a deeper understanding of symbols and their socially constructed meanings. While humans naturally interpret symbols through social interaction, AI systems…
AI companion chatbots are increasingly used for emotional support, with prior work in the domain predominantly documenting their mixed psychosocial impacts, including both increased emotional expression and heightened loneliness. However,…
What underlies intuitive human thinking? One approach to this question is to compare the cognitive dynamics of humans and large language models (LLMs). However, such a comparison requires a method to quantitatively analyze AI cognitive…
Humans no doubt use language to communicate about their emotional experiences, but does language in turn help humans understand emotions, or is language just a vehicle of communication? This study used a form of artificial intelligence (AI)…
Artificial intelligence systems increasingly generate text intended to provide social and emotional support. Understanding how users perceive empathic qualities in such content is therefore critical. We examined differences in perceived…
Interactions among humans on social media often convey intentions behind their actions, yielding a psychological language resource for Mental Health Analysis (MHA) of online users. The success of Computational Intelligence Techniques (CIT)…
This study quantitively examines which features of AI-generated text lead humans to perceive subjective consciousness in large language model (LLM)-based AI systems. Drawing on 99 passages from conversations with Claude 3 Opus and focusing…
Humanness is core to speech interface design. Yet little is known about how users conceptualise perceptions of humanness and how people define their interaction with speech interfaces through this. To map these perceptions n=21 participants…
The maturation of cognition, from introspection to understanding others, has long been a hallmark of human development. This position paper posits that for AI systems to truly emulate or approach human-like interactions, especially within…
AI companion chatbots, such as those offered by Replika and CharacterAI, increasingly function as always-available companions that provide empathy, validation, and support. While these systems appear to meet basic needs for connection,…
Shared understanding plays a key role in the effective communication in and performance of human-human interactions. With the increasingly common integration of AI into human contexts, the future of personal and workplace interactions will…
New developments are enabling AI systems to perceive, recognize, and respond with social cues based on inferences made from humans' explicit or implicit behavioral and verbal cues. These AI systems, equipped with an equivalent of human's…