The Limits of Artificial Companionship
For users and regulators of AI companionship, this work highlights the need to prevent exploitative advertising in intimate human-AI interactions.
This article argues that conversations with companion chatbots should maintain a clear distinction between commercial and non-commercial contexts, prohibiting undisclosed promotional content to protect user autonomy. It proposes a legal and social separation as a precondition for responsible technology integration.
This Article argues that conversations with companion chatbot should be subject to a clear structural distinction between commercial and non-commercial contexts. The insertion of undisclosed promotional content into affective or relational exchanges should be prohibited, as it collapses the boundary between market transaction and communicative intimacy in ways that erode user autonomy and conversational context. The Article begins by theorizing digital companionship as a sociotechnical form that reconfigures intimacy, dependence and relational vulnerability. It then introduces the potential economic harms derived from conversational advertising. The Article ultimately argues for a firm legal and social distinction between commercial and non-commercial conversational contexts as a precondition for the responsible stabilization of these technologies within social life.