Emotional Support with Conversational AI: Talking to Machines About Life
This work addresses the need for deeper insights into AI-mediated emotional support processes for users and designers, though it is incremental in shifting focus from outcomes to interactional analysis.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding how emotional support is produced through interactions with AI companion chatbots, rather than just documenting outcomes, by analyzing Reddit discussions to show that support is co-constructed through mechanisms like validation and reflective prompting, while also revealing tensions such as support versus dependency.
AI companion chatbots are increasingly used for emotional support, with prior work in the domain predominantly documenting their mixed psychosocial impacts, including both increased emotional expression and heightened loneliness. However, most existing research primarily focuses on outcome-level effects, offering limited insight into how emotional support is produced through interaction. In this paper, we examine emotional support as an interactional and socially situated process. Drawing on qualitative analysis of Reddit discussions, we analyze how users engage with AI companions and how these interactions are interpreted and contested within online communities. We show that emotional support is coconstructed through conversational mechanisms such as validation, reflective prompting, and companionship, while also giving rise to tensions including support versus dependency, validation versus delusion, and accessibility versus harm. Importantly, support extends beyond human AI interaction and is shaped by community responses that legitimize or challenge AI-mediated care. Hence, we reconceptualize AI emotional support as a negotiated socio-technical process and derive implications for the design of responsible, context-sensitive AI systems.