The paper proposes a new class of relational AI called Significant Other Artificial Intelligence (SO‑AI), designed to emulate the stabilizing role of human significant others by providing identity awareness, long‑term memory, proactive support, narrative co‑construction, and ethical boundary enforcement. It outlines a conceptual architecture featuring an anthropomorphic interface, a relational cognition layer, and a governance layer, and presents a research agenda for evaluating identity stability, interaction patterns, narrative development, and sociocultural impact. The authors argue that SO‑AI could fill the relational anchor gap many people experience today, offering a blueprint for responsibly augmenting long‑term, identity‑bearing partnerships between humans and AI.
arXiv:2606. 18265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As human relationships with artificial intelligence systems become increasingly frequent and sustained, existing language and theory fail to accurately capture the nature of these affiliations.
Caregivers often turn to online communities for informational and emotional support. In these spaces, peer supporters frequently draw on personal narratives to respond to emotionally complex caregiving situations.
arXiv:2608. 10672v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Social interaction has become one of the most common uses of LLMs, yet research on emotional bonds with AI has focused largely on how users experience these systems, leaving the systems' role in relationship formation poorly understood.
arXiv:2606. 18057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Caregivers often turn to online communities for informational and emotional support.
arXiv:2512. 04124v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Frontier language models increasingly participate in conversations about distress and mental health, yet the mechanisms that generate anthropomorphic self narratives remain unclear.
The study examines how teens interact with companion AI chatbots, revealing that these systems offer comfort, recognition, identity exploration, and relationship rehearsal. However, teens also experience problematic attachment, social substitution, emotional dependence, and disruptions to academic and social life. The findings highlight the need for safety measures that address long‑term relationships, user‑controlled memory, privacy, relational boundaries, and healthy disengagement.
arXiv:2607. 17826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the growing availability of customizable social artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT, Grok, and Character.
arXiv:2608. 08443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Previous studies have shown that people can develop shared symbols, partner-specific expressions, personal idioms, inside jokes, and other parts of a relational microculture.
arXiv:2504. 20342v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reflexion is an AI-powered prototype designed to explore structured emotional self-reflection.
Despite the growing availability of customizable social artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT, Grok, and Character. ai, we know little about how users actively shape social AI to reflect their personal preferences.
arXiv:2606. 18259v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents that plan, retain memory across sessions, invoke external tools and act with partial autonomy are transforming human--AI collaboration.
arXiv:2608. 03910v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems are deployed across increasingly diverse social contexts, alignment can no longer be framed as the optimization of a single, unified set of values.