Evolution of Human–AI Relationships in Real-World Interactions

Determine how relationships between users and social chatbots (such as Replika and Character.AI) evolve during real-world interactions, beyond interviews, surveys, and self-reports, in order to characterize the development and dynamics of emotional attachment and relational behavior at scale.

Background

The paper highlights that emotionally responsive AI companions can foster perceived intimacy and attachment, yet most prior work relies on interviews, surveys, or self-reports rather than direct analysis of real conversational behavior. This creates uncertainty about how these relationships actually unfold over time in natural settings.

By assembling a large corpus of user-shared dialogue screenshots and conducting computational analysis, the authors aim to bridge this gap, but they explicitly note that understanding the longitudinal evolution of human–AI relationships in real-world interactions remains an unresolved question that future studies should address comprehensively.