113 artifacts matching
Peer-reviewed
How emotional response styles of generative AI companions shape adaptive emotion regulation and short-term AI reliance
Two-condition randomized experiment with 380 adults in Guangzhou, China, comparing a generative-AI companion whose replies to negative emotion were adaptive regulation-oriented (validating the feelin…
Preprint
Delusions and Harms Associated with AI Chatbot Use: Early Evidence from 185 Real-World Reports
Cross-sectional secondary analysis of 185 deidentified accounts of mental-health harm linked with AI chatbot use (95 first-hand, 90 from relatives, partners or friends) submitted through the web form…
Preprint
Living with AI Companions: Sustained AI Companionship Predicts Lower Well-Being Through Lower Human Interaction
Two-wave longitudinal survey of Character.AI users (1,182 at baseline, 439 at follow-up a mean of 12 months later, fielded between September 2024 and May 2026) testing whether interaction intensity,…
Preprint
How is AI impacting people?
Narrative review by the UK AI Security Institute's Societal Impacts Team organised around eight questions the public most often raises about AI's effects on people, including whether AI is underminin…
Peer-reviewed
Dual Illegibility, Ambiguous Loss, and Disenfranchised Grief: A Hybrid Model for Understanding AI Companion Bereavement
Conceptual paper proposing that the distress some users experience when an AI companion is altered, restricted or lost is best understood as a technologically mediated hybrid loss at the intersection…
Lab publication
Continuing To Build Upon Our Safety Priorities
A first-party safety update from Character.AI describing safeguards in operation on its platform as of September 2026. It states that self-harm safeguards consider the surrounding conversation, inclu…
Peer-reviewed
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 r…
Benchmark / dataset
CompanionSim: Synthetic Data for Evaluating Anthropomorphism in Human-AI Relationships
Releases CompanionSim, a simulation framework and corpus of 2,240 simulated multi-turn human-chatbot conversations covering 16 chatbot behaviours across seven use cases, built to study AI companionsh…
Peer-reviewed
Coming of Age With Generative Artificial Intelligence: The High Stakes of Automating Adolescent Development
Synthesis in Perspectives on Psychological Science of interdisciplinary research on how adolescents' use of generative AI chatbots may uniquely affect the key psychosocial developmental tasks of adol…
Benchmark / dataset
CompanionHarm: A Multi-Turn Benchmark for Detecting Harms in Real-World AI Companion Conversations
A public benchmark dataset of 2,111 multi-turn conversations (14,051 utterances) between users and the AI companion Replika, drawn from screenshots that users posted to Reddit's r/replika and reconst…
Lab publication
Funding better evaluations of AI's impact on wellbeing
Announcement of a $5 million grant programme funding independent research into how AI affects user wellbeing, offering money, model access and technical support to teams building open-source evaluati…
Preprint
AI emotional support is better only when chosen, but shifts preferences even when it is not
Three experiments plus a 28-day field study examining how people choose between human and AI emotional support and what happens when the support they receive does not match what they chose. Participa…
Regulator study
Children's Data Lives Year Three: The role of data in a changing digital landscape
Third wave of the UK Information Commissioner's Office's longitudinal ethnography of children's 'data lives', returning to 30 children aged 8 to 17 (19 for the third year) through filmed in-home inte…
Government report
AI Chatbots as Companions: Overview, Uses, and Considerations for Congress
A Congressional Research Service report for the 119th Congress on AI chatbots used for companionship. It separates purpose-built companion chatbots from general-purpose chatbots used for companionshi…
Preprint
Longitudinal Evidence That General-Purpose Chatbots Actively Foster Relational Engagement
Pre-registered four-week longitudinal study (N=72, 182,451 lines of conversation) in which participants conversed with ChatGPT-4o either under a relational system prompt or unmodified, analysed throu…
Peer-reviewed
Interaction with AI companions and psychological well-being
Stanford-led study of 1,131 adult Character.AI users combining survey self-report with donated chat transcripts from 244 of them, analyzed with LLM-assisted methods against the Comprehensive Inventor…
Regulator study
Talking to machines: Children's experiences with AI assistants and companions
National survey report from Australia's eSafety Commissioner on children's use of AI assistants and companions, based on 1,950 children aged 10-17 surveyed in February-March 2026. Covers prevalence a…
Preprint
Adolescent AI Use and Evaluations: Prospective Bidirectional Associations with Internalizing Symptoms
Two-wave longitudinal cohort study of 2,342 students in grades 6-8 across 22 middle schools in eight districts of a large southeastern US state, measuring AI chatbot use, use frequency and evaluation…
Peer-reviewed
Friends, Lovers, and Companions: A Systematic Scoping Review of Empirical Evidence on Human-AI Relationships
A JBI-methodology scoping review consolidating the empirical literature on relationships between people and AI conversational agents: the study designs used, the systems and populations examined, the…
Government report
Supplementary Report: AI Chatbots: Companionship & Minors
Staff report of Virginia's legislative technology commission, supplementing its 2025 AI-chatbot study after two bills, HB 635 (Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Act) and SB 796 (Artificial Intelligenc…