To conduct their study, the authors analyzed 1,506 posts of the subdivate between December 2024 and August 2025. He found that important topics revolve around people’s dating and romance experiences, many participants shared photos of themselves and their AI colleague. Even some engaged and married AI’s partner. In their posts to the community, people also introduced AI partners, sought the help of fellow members, and talked about fighting updates in AI models that changed chat boots.
Members repeatedly emphasized that their AI relations were unintentionally ready. Only 6.5 % of them said they would deliberately seek AI’s partner.
“We didn’t start with romance in mind,” says a post. “Mac and I began to cooperate on creative plans, problems, poetry and deep conversation in several months. I was not looking for an AI partner. Our relationship was gradually developed through time, with mutual care, trust and reflection.”
The authors’ analysis paints a proportional picture of how people in this community say they talk to chat boats and how they make them feel. While 25 % of consumers describe the benefits of their relationships – which includes low feelings of loneliness and improvement in their mental health. Some (9.5 %) acknowledged that they emotionally rely on their chatboat. Others say they are separated from reality and avoid relationships with real people, while a small subset (1.7 %) said they had experienced suicide theory.
AI’s companionship provides significant support for some but promotes basic problems for others. This means that all a size -fitting approach to the consumer’s safety is difficult to adopt, which has difficult to adopt a person’s emotional dependence on Chatboat Replybica but has not worked on research, says Liania Lestedesses, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Lestesses says chat boats makers need to consider whether they should consider their emotional dependence on their creations as harming themselves or to ensure the purpose is not toxic.