Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Erik Erikson described the central challenge of adolescence as building a stable identity — a coherent sense of who you are that can hold up across different contexts and relationships. The failure to...
Read article →The last of Erikson's eight stages arrives at the end of life, and it frames the psychological task of old age in a way that is both simple and demanding. The question is this: can you look back at th...
Read article →There is a stage in identity development that gets misread almost universally. It looks like confusion, like delay, like a failure to get your life together. From the outside, someone in this stage mi...
Read article →Most people who have experienced identity foreclosure do not know there is a name for it. It presents not as a crisis but as its absence — a life that feels settled, purposeful, and coherent, but that...
Read article →When a study on parasocial relationships with AI companions appeared in Nature Human Behaviour, it marked something of a turning point. Parasocial relationships — the one-sided emotional bonds people...
Read article →There is a particular kind of lostness that does not announce itself. It does not feel like crisis. It does not feel like anything much at all. You move through your days, you do what is in front of y...
Read article →Among the pieces of research most relevant to understanding how AI companion use affects real users over time, a study published in npj Mental Health Research examining Replika users stands out for it...
Read article →A study from researchers affiliated with Harvard Business School has become one of the more cited pieces of evidence in discussions of AI companion effectiveness. The research, led by Julian De Freita...
Read article →Among the studies most frequently cited in discussions of AI companion effects on wellbeing, the MIT Media Lab research on usage patterns stands out for its scale and for what it found when it looked...
Read article →One of the more specific and well-documented applications of AI companion technology in clinical settings comes from Stanford University research examining a tool called Noora, deployed specifically w...
Read article →A particular kind of concern comes up regularly in conversations about AI companions: if you are spending time with an AI instead of reaching out to people, you are withdrawing from human connection....
Read article →Woebot is one of the most studied AI-based mental health tools in existence, with a body of published randomized controlled trial data that is unusual in the consumer digital health space. Understandi...
Read article →The philosophical objection to AI companions runs something like this: the AI does not actually understand anything. It processes tokens, produces statistically likely outputs, and mimics understandin...
Read article →Among the applications of AI companion technology with the most direct policy implications, the ElliQ program deployed through New York State stands out. The pilot, which placed AI companion devices i...
Read article →A large-scale study from Japan, drawing on data from over fourteen thousand users, offers a window into how AI companion use relates to wellbeing in a real-world population over time. The research, pu...
Read article →One of the most common things people say when they hear about AI companions for the first time is something like: "I heard those things are all basically the same." The implication is that whether you...
Read article →Every few years, a category of technology gets labeled a fad. Wearable fitness trackers were going to be a fad. Podcasts were going to be a fad. Electric vehicles were going to be a fad. The fad predi...
Read article →The idea that AI conversations are scripted is one of the most persistent misconceptions about modern AI companions. It imagines something like a decision tree — a finite map of possible exchanges whe...
Read article →American technology has always been an export product. The internet was designed in the United States. Social media platforms that now shape political discourse in dozens of countries were built in Ca...
Read article →The claim surfaces in think pieces and comment sections with some regularity: AI is coming for your pets. The argument holds that as AI companions become more capable and responsive, people will opt f...
Read article →Governments are paying attention to AI companions. The pace of regulatory activity has accelerated noticeably over the past two years, and the coming half-decade will almost certainly see formal legal...
Read article →The concern that AI companions make people antisocial is intuitive and understandable. Time spent with an AI is time not spent with humans, the argument goes, and the relationships formed with AI cann...
Read article →When people hear about AI companions, one of the first assumptions is that this must be something expensive. A subscription to yet another app, probably priced out of reach for anyone without a tech s...
Read article →The myth that AI companions are primarily or exclusively for men is wrong in most of the ways it can be wrong — wrong about who uses them, wrong about why it assumes what it assumes, and wrong about w...
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