Technically Love: The Evolution of Human–AI Romance Discourse on Reddit

Key Findings

• — A high-precision dataset of self-disclosed romantic-companion posts spanning 2017 to 2025 (3,383 posts in the arXiv version; 3,292 in the published abstract) was analysed with topic modelling and temporal statistical tests.
• — Significant topic drift was found: discussion shifted from positive intimate relationships toward platform governance, technical issues and real-world consequences.
• — The authors interpret the shift as a transition from private experience to technical mediation and regulation, with implications for the design and governance of companion systems.
• — The paper is the first longitudinal, user-initiated public-discourse analysis of human-AI romance in the library; prior held work is cross-sectional or interview-based.

Methodology Notes

Computational discourse analysis (topic modelling plus temporal statistics) on Reddit posts filtered for self-disclosed romantic relationships with AI companions, 2017 to 2025; platform-selected sample. Published 2026-07-21 in the CUI 2026 proceedings (CC BY 4.0); the arXiv version (2604.15333, v1 2026-03-09, v2 2026-05-12 'Accepted at ACM CUI 2026') carries the 3,383 count while the published abstract reports 3,292, a discrepancy noted by the benchmarks beat. Verified via Crossref metadata and the arXiv abstract page; dl.acm.org is unreachable from this workspace.

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