From virtuality to biodigital presence: Hypnotic mechanisms in AI-mediated mental health communication

The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence and synthetic media is profoundly reshaping contemporary mental health communication. Avatars, conversational agents, and AI-generated human entities increasingly occupy relational and affective functions once associated exclusively with human interaction. While existing frameworks describe these entities as virtual, this terminology fails to account for the real psychological and relational effects they produce. This article introduces the concept of biodigital presence to describe the perceived social, emotional, and relational presence generated by synthetic human entities within AI-mediated communication environments and argues that this presence operates through mechanisms structurally analogous to hypnotic communication, including attentional absorption, emotional mirroring, reduction of critical distance, and heightened suggestibility. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis informed by netnographic methodology, this study examines user interactions with three paradigmatic biodigital influencers, Lil Miquela, Shudu Gram, and Imma, through a corpus of approximately 1,500 publicly available Instagram comments collected between January 2023 and June 2025. Analysis reveals four consistent hypnotic communicational mechanisms across all three cases: narrative continuity, emotional mirroring, ontological management, and immersive personalization. Each influencer deploys a distinct variant of these mechanisms, narrative absorption, aesthetic absorption, and reflexive absorption respectively, producing measurable emotional attachment and reduced critical distance among their audiences. These findings carry significant implications for mental health communication, including risks of emotional dependency, synthetic empathy, persuasive vulnerability, and the reconfiguration of supportive relationships in digital environments, particularly among psychologically vulnerable populations.