Friends, Lovers, and Companions: A Systematic Scoping Review of Empirical Evidence on Human-AI Relationships

Key Findings

• — 89 studies met inclusion out of 2,280 identified, and the literature is dominated by qualitative and correlational designs with many studies concentrated on a single platform, Replika
• — The included work organises into three thematic orientations: mechanisms underlying engagement, relational experiences with conversational agents, and psychosocial effects
• — Loneliness is the most frequently reported motivator for use, and users often report reduced loneliness, emotional support, improved social confidence, and positive erotic and relational experiences
• — Quantitative experimental and longitudinal evidence remains limited and mixed, so the review does not support a uniform effect in either direction
• — Effects appear contingent on individual characteristics, contextual conditions and patterns of use rather than being uniform across users
• — The stated research needs are longitudinal experimental work, more diversity in platforms and populations studied, and regular systematic syntheses

Methodology Notes

JBI scoping-review methodology, three databases searched September 2025 with supplementary sources, dual independent extraction. Published open access under CC BY-NC 4.0 as article 100384. Date precision: Crossref carries month precision only (2026-08), so the day is set to 01 by convention; the Crossref record was created 2026-08-19 and OpenAlex records a publication date of 2026-08-01. Verification route, stated because it is not the normal one: sciencedirect.com returns HTTP 403 to this host on every user agent tried, and Europe PMC has no record, so the artifact was confirmed against the publisher's own deposited metadata through Crossref (title, all six authors, venue, article number, CC BY-NC version-of-record licence) and OpenAlex, which returns the full publisher-deposited abstract from which every figure above is taken. The full text has not been read; findings beyond the abstract should not be attributed to this row without an operator fetch.

Sources