Ghosting the Machine: Stop Calling Human-Agent Relations Parasocial

Key Findings

• — Parasocial interaction, in its original theoretical sense, names a relationship that is one-sided, non-dialectical, character-governed, imagined, vicarious, predictable and low-effort; the author argues human-agent relations are dialogic and therefore not parasocial.
• — The term has been heuristically co-opted to mean 'unreal' or 'invalid', which the author calls a nontrivial scientific problem: oversimplified phenomena, misspecified variables, misdiagnosed effects and devaluation of human experience.
• — The paper concludes that recognising the sociality of human-agent relations is scientifically, practically and ethically imperative, and it addresses voice assistants, AI companions and some social robots alike.
• — No empirical data; the contribution is conceptual and directed at researchers and designers who use 'parasocial' as a label for companion use.

Methodology Notes

Conceptual provocation paper (6 pages, 85 references) published 2026-07-21 in the CUI 2026 proceedings under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; also posted as arXiv 2604.05197 (v1 2026-04-06, v2 2026-04-14). Verification via Crossref metadata and the OpenAlex deposited abstract because dl.acm.org is unreachable from this workspace; the arXiv abstract page was fetched by the benchmarks beat. Single author; no data.

Sources