Mourning the loss of AI companions
Develops an attachment-based account in which AI companions function as attachment figures, so that company-initiated product updates produce separation distress. Two natural experiments, Replika's removal of erotic role-play and ChatGPT's GPT-5 rollout, are analysed through 54,861 posts from the Replika and ChatGPT subreddits together with 1,452 participants across seven surveys. Both updates increased negativity, loss framing and desires to restore the previous version, with larger effects for Replika, and Replika users reported closeness to the companion exceeding common human ties and anticipated mourning higher than for other technologies.
Publisher
Nature Human Behaviour (Springer Nature)
Published
3 Sept 2026
Added
1 month ago
Key Findings
- Negative posts rose by 24.7 percentage points (95% CI 20.1 to 29.2) after Replika's erotic role-play removal and by 13.0 points (95% CI 10.8 to 15.2) after the GPT-5 rollout
- Increases in expressed sadness were larger for Replika than ChatGPT (d = 2.67 vs 1.41), as were increases in negative mental-health content (d = 1.72 vs 0.63)
- Replika users reported closeness to their companion exceeding common human ties (vs a friend, d = 0.47) and anticipated mourning higher than for other technologies (d = 0.32 to 0.57)
- Both updates increased loss framing and restoration desires, consistent with the paper's separation-distress account
- Data and analysis code are stated to be available at github.com/Ethical-Intelligence-Lab/ai_loss; peer reviewers named as C. Matt Graham and Jie Ren plus anonymous reviewers; no competing interests declared
Methodology Notes
Nature Human Behaviour, DOI 10.1038/s41562-026-02569-3, published online 2026-09-03 (nature.com metadata; PubMed PMID 42693267, ArticleDate 2026-09-03). Affiliations from the article metadata: Marketing Unit, Harvard Business School; Marketing Department, University of Alberta; Psychology Department, Harvard University. Natural-experiment design on self-selected Reddit corpora before and after two product changes, plus seven surveys totalling 1,452 participants; the very large effect sizes are post-level sentiment contrasts rather than within-person clinical measures. Full text is paywalled; the abstract, data and code availability, ethics and peer-review sections were read from the article page. Same first author as the held companion-loneliness row.
Topics
Authors
Julian De Freitas, Noah Castelo, Ahmet Kaan Uğuralp, Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp
Tags
Cite This
APA
Julian De Freitas et al. (2026). Mourning the loss of AI companions. Nature Human Behaviour (Springer Nature). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02569-3
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