• Projects

• Research Area 2

P7 | Personal sphere: Companionship and ComAI

• Prof. Dr. Michaela Pfadenhauer

The project investigates the emergence of artificial companionship-apps (e.g., Replika, Nomi.ai, Paradot) in the personal sphere which corresponds to the changing nature of companionship in the twenty-first century. Since these apps draw on professional expertise in the counselling field, we examine artificial companionship with regard to already existing companionship services. With grief and day-to-day life management, we compare two variants of companionship in the personal sphere that differ in their levels of intervention. We analyze companionship as a communicative form that constitutes an ideally “close to equal” but nevertheless asymmetric relation.

This is realized by an exchange of “narrative episodes” and thus built up across situations. As a communicative form, companionship is not purely individual, it operates as a facet of societal communication. We approach the concept of companionship through discourse and genre analysis and explore the (hybrid) agency in the companion relation through (digital) ethnography.

Four research questions guide our investigation:

1. How is the concept of companionship discursively constructed?
2. In which way do “narrative episodes” constitute companionship as a communicative form?
3. How does ComAI refigure companion relations in terms of agency?
4. How can we theorize the appropriation of ComAI in the personal sphere the challenge of companionship?