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How AI Companions Alter Social Behavior

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Figure 6. Source: Loga, Raquel (2025). Retrieved from: 

https://www.ie.edu/center-for-health-and-well-being/blog/ais-cognitive-implications-the-decline-of-our-thinking-skills/

Going back and forth between interacting with a robot and interacting with real people is not as smooth of a transition as one might think.

Self-absorption

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Unlike the two-sided nature of human conversation, AI and human interaction is based off of the control of the human. The human can choose when they want to talk to the AI companion and what they want to talk about. The person is essentially "shaping" the conversation "line-by-line" (Fontenelle 2025). Because of this, prolonged interaction with AI companions will cause a person to become more accustomed to conversations being centered around their own wants and needs. This leads to socially inept behavior like  interupting a person in the middle of their thought, not really listening to what the other person is saying, and constantly steering the conversation toward self-related topics.

Figure 7. Source: Torres, Victor (2024). Retrieved from: 

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/what-does-it-mean-to-be-self-absorbed#definition

Lack of Friction

A truth of humanity is that real human relationships are maintained with mutual effort to work through obstacles within the relationship. It is the effort required to overcome this friction that ultimately strengthens the bond of the relationship. Relationships with AI companions do not involve this friction as the companions are designed to be always agreeable and uplifting. While this does give the person more immediate comfort and pleasure than it would in a normal human interaction, it has no beneficial lasting effect. As Sherry Turkle notes in Alone Together, the reduced friction and lack of meaning in the human-AI interactions lead us to "lower our expectations of all relationships" and distance ourselves from the real, gritty conversations that form lasting bonds (Turkle 125).

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Figure 8. Source: Novella, Steven (2024). Retrieved from: 

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/ai-companions-good-or-bad/

Our social skills are a muscle that need to be worked out in order to be preserved and improved.

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