Frictionless Love: Associations Between AI Companion Roles and Behavioral Addiction
A large text analysis of how people describe the role their AI companion plays, and how those roles associate with signs of behavioural addiction. 248,830 posts from seven Reddit communities yield ten recurring metaphorical roles. The association with addiction signs runs strongest not for romantic roles but for coach and guardian roles.
Publisher
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2026); Nokia Bell Labs
Published
25 Jun 2026
Added
today
Key Findings
- 248,830 posts drawn from seven Reddit communities about AI companions.
- Ten recurring metaphorical roles were identified in how users describe their companion.
- Soulmate companions associate with reports of emotional support, but also with emotional manipulation and distress.
- Coach and guardian roles associate more frequently with signs of behavioural addiction, including disruption to daily life and damage to offline relationships.
- The role framing, rather than the romantic framing, is what tracks the addiction signal, which inverts the common assumption about which companion types are risky.
Methodology Notes
All constructs are inferred from post text; there is no clinical measure of addiction and no denominator of users, so these are associations among self-described posts in self-selected communities. FAccT 2026 pp. 8223-8246, DOI 10.1145/3805689.3812235, published 2026-06-25; arXiv preprint 2604.20011. Metadata verified through the Crossref record (dl.acm.org unreachable from this box).
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Authors
Vibhor Agarwal, Ke Zhou, Edyta Paulina Bogucka, Daniele Quercia
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Cite This
APA
Vibhor Agarwal et al. (2026). Frictionless Love: Associations Between AI Companion Roles and Behavioral Addiction. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2026); Nokia Bell Labs. https://doi.org/10.1145/3805689.3812235