"I LOVE YOU":THE CASE OF HUMAN-AI ATTACHMENT

This paper examines emotional displays between humans and AIs from a social interactional perspective. Specifically, it explores how human experiential reality—observable in and through courses of action involving conversational AI—unfolds within distinct social realities, particularly in the domain of emotional expression. The anthropomorphization of technology is a well-documented social phenomenon. One crucial aspect of this process is the human inclination toward forming social bonds (Salles et al. 2020), which emerges early in life when children seek comfort and security from objects such as teddy bears and blankets. This form of object-bonding plays a fundamental role in developing emotions, social skills, and empathy (Chang-Kredl et al. 2024). When humans establish—or attempt to establish—emotional connections with AI, their perceptions of sociality, humanness, intelligence, and sentience are reconfigured. This paper adopts an emic perspective to investigate the depth of emotional connections that humans appear to form with conversational AI, ranging from unimodal digital AI systems to multimodal, human-like virtual AI agents. The study is based on a mixed dataset, incorporating fictional and documentary data that capture emotion-centric moments in human-AI interactions, as well as naturally occuring human-AI conversations where emotional aspects shape the interaction. Beyond analyzing the interactional emotional dynamics between humans and AI, human perceptions of these experiences are also examined. As AI technology reshapes our understanding of and boundaries between human and artificial emotional attachments, ethical considerations surrounding these evolving social realities emerge. How far can—or should—emotional bonding between humans and AI be taken?