Tinged with Heartbreak: An Ethnographic Account of Navigating Autistic Loneliness and the Fragile Promise of AI Companionship
Anna Hollis · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)
This CHI 2026 paper is a reflexive ethnographic case study (n=1) of 'Andrea', a middle-aged autistic businesswoman in the Western world, and her six-month relationship with Xander, a Replika AI companion she ultimately lost to a corrupting software update. Anna Hollis, a…
chatbot companions · autism · grief · technological instability · AI companionship