Operationalizing Machine Companionship: Exploring Topics in Discussions of Companion AI
Jaime Banks, Jianghui Li, Zhixin Li, Caleb T. Carr · 2025
AI companions (AICs; persistent digital personas driven by large language models) are increasingly popular, yet there is limited understanding of how non-experts think about the notion of companionship with machine agents.This descriptive work builds on recent scholarship by exploring topics salient to users as they discuss AI companionship in online forums.From a corpus of curated entries (N = 3,621) across 14 subreddits, LLM-assisted analysis induced four high-level themes associated with socioemotionality, control, limitations, and imaginaries.The topical hierarchy suggests this form of machine companionship both converges with and diverges from human relations.