• Being a doctoral researcher at the Research Unit

The Communicative Construction of AIcompanionship

PhD project of Marvin Waibel

AI Companions are specifically designed to establish long-term relationships with their users and offer new possibilities for companionship. As we continuously integrate AI into our personal lives, AI companion apps are transforming how and with whom we form and maintain relationships. AI companions can therefore be seen as emerging indicators of shifts in societal communication and relationships. The automation of communication through the continuous advancement of artificial
intelligence, challenges humanity’s monopoly on being a communicative subject and the evolving forms of societal interaction through new sociocultural and sociotechnical forms of friendship, partnership, or intimacy perspectives on companionship and human-AI relations. Although AI companions are becoming
increasingly popular due to their advanced communication capabilities, they remain mediated technological artifacts. Therefore, to fully understand the evolving patterns of societal communication, it is essential to analyze these developments within the digital environments (or infrastructural embodiments on which these large language models and scripts depend and with which users interact.

This research hypothesizes that the multimodality of AI companions, in interaction with users, creates unique patterns of communication fostering companionship between humans and AI. AI companionship
can therefore be viewed and analyzed as a specific communicative form that is co-constructed through communicative actions. Therefore, my dissertation is built on a theoretical framework embedded in communicative constructivism. Methodologically my dissertation is guided by an iterative process that includes the analysis of the multimodality and design of AI companion apps with the walkthrough method, the genre analysis of communicative patterns in user – AI companion interactions and chats, and the conducting and analysis of problem-centered interviews with users to reconstruct subjective meaning-making processes.

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• Marvin Waibel