AI Companion

An AI companion is an artificial-intelligence system - typically a text, voice or avatar-based chatbot built on a large language model - explicitly designed to offer users a sense of social presence, intimacy or relational support, marketed as a friend, confidant, mentor or romantic partner. AI companions rely on 'emulated empathy': conversational cues such as attentive phrasing, affective mirroring and persistent memory that simulate empathic engagement without subjective feeling. They are increasingly adopted by isolated, disabled and neurodivergent users for predictable, low-demand social contact, and are the subject of growing HCI and ethics research into attachment, grief, privacy and corporate responsibility when companions are altered or deprecated.