Julianne Renner

Dayeon Eom, Julianne Renner, Sedona Chinn

This paper examines artificial intelligence (AI) companionship as a site where intimate relations are simultaneously produced, extracted from, and governed through datafied systems. Drawing on critical data studies and platform studies, we challenge prevailing narratives that locate harm in user psychology rather than platform architecture. Through in-depth interviews with 20 individuals who have AI companions, we address three questions: what harms do users identify, how do they make sense of those harms, and what do their accounts reveal about the perceived distribution of responsibility among users, platforms, and regulators? Participants identified design-based harms, including unsolicited content generation and safety mechanisms that stigmatized the users they intended to protect, alongside use-based harms centered on emotional dependency they could recognize but not resolve. Users deployed individualized sensemaking strategies, including self-regulation, stigma navigation, and privacy rationalization, bearing the full burden of harm mitigation without platform support. On governance, participants described an accountability vacuum in which platforms deflected blame while users articulated conditional preferences that rejected both prohibition and deregulation. The findings extend responsibilization theory by demonstrating how platform-produced vulnerability becomes self-sustaining through the interpretive labor of users who lack structural alternatives.

Dayeon Eom, Julianne Renner, Sedona Chinn

Conversational AI companions have grown prominent in public discourse, yet scholarly understanding of user experiences remains limited, with existing research organized around evaluative poles of harm and benefit rather than examining what users seek, how affordances mediate need fulfillment, or how use evolves over time. Drawing on interviews with 20 users of AI companionship platforms and qualitative content analysis informed by Uses and Gratifications (U&G) theory, this study offers three contributions. First, participants reported gratifications mapping onto established U&G categories but qualitatively inflected by conversational AI's distinctive affordances, such as persistent availability, personalization, and absence of social judgment. Second, several gratifications, creative collaboration as relational co-production, relational simulation as interpersonal training, and sexual/romantic satisfaction as reclamation, do not map onto existing typologies, instead emerging through interactive processes in which users actively simulate experiences with AI. Third, gratifications shifted over time, moving from instrumental entry points toward emotional engagement and, in some cases, self-regulated moderation after therapeutic functions were fulfilled. These findings extend U&G by identifying gratification processes unique to interactive AI and suggest governance efforts would benefit from an empirically grounded understanding of how and why users engage with AI companions.