Topic
Conversational AI positioned as social company, friendship or emotional support, and what happens to users of it.
Researchers at Singapore Management University and Duke-NUS argue that AI companions supplement people who already have social support and substitute for people who do not. They call governance the weakest of the four protective layers they name.
Reality
The American Federation of Teachers got Microsoft to bar training on student data, ban companion features built for emotional attachment and accept outside audits. District buyers now have a written term sheet to put to every other vendor.
Reality
Harvard and Alberta researchers coded 54,861 subreddit posts around two real AI updates and surveyed 1,452 people. The reaction to Replika's silent change was larger, and it lasted longer than the reaction to GPT-5.
Reality
Her forthcoming book Artificial Intimacy argues that children especially will lose their reference point for real warmth by practicing on systems that only simulate it. The case is ethnographic, built from four decades of interviews.
Reality
A CESifo working paper randomised 12,365 French adults into four weeks of chatbot conversation. The talks rated more pleasant, while loneliness, life satisfaction and depressive affect all moved the wrong way.
Reality