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<p>Socially responsive AI systems such as large language models—a prominent class of generative AI—voice assistants, and social robots are increasingly integrated into everyday emotional life, with users forming bonds that resemble friendship, care, and romantic attachment. This article proposes a five-phase model of designed relationality that explains how interactional patterns, cultural expectations, and affective design collectively scaffold these relationships. Building on Computers as Social Actors (CASA) and contemporary research on human–AI relations, the model identifies recurrent affective logics including Novelty, Emotional Disclosure, Reinforcing Feedback, Relational Rhythm, and Emotional Attachment, and examines how these trajectories emerge across both embodied and disembodied systems. Disruption, disengagement, and rupture are not treated here as a sixth phase, but as a non-linear analytic condition that can interrupt, suspend, or terminate any phase of the relational trajectory. The article situates emotional enmeshment within broader sociotechnical infrastructures, arguing that attachment is not a user error but a predictable outcome of affective engineering. The model offers a framework for evaluating the ethical and psychological stakes of synthetic relationality and highlights the need for design and governance approaches that prioritize transparency, boundaries, and user agency.</p>

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Human–AI relationships as designed relationality: a sociotechnical model

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年3月11日

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  • Julie Carpenter

摘要

Socially responsive AI systems such as large language models—a prominent class of generative AI—voice assistants, and social robots are increasingly integrated into everyday emotional life, with users forming bonds that resemble friendship, care, and romantic attachment. This article proposes a five-phase model of designed relationality that explains how interactional patterns, cultural expectations, and affective design collectively scaffold these relationships. Building on Computers as Social Actors (CASA) and contemporary research on human–AI relations, the model identifies recurrent affective logics including Novelty, Emotional Disclosure, Reinforcing Feedback, Relational Rhythm, and Emotional Attachment, and examines how these trajectories emerge across both embodied and disembodied systems. Disruption, disengagement, and rupture are not treated here as a sixth phase, but as a non-linear analytic condition that can interrupt, suspend, or terminate any phase of the relational trajectory. The article situates emotional enmeshment within broader sociotechnical infrastructures, arguing that attachment is not a user error but a predictable outcome of affective engineering. The model offers a framework for evaluating the ethical and psychological stakes of synthetic relationality and highlights the need for design and governance approaches that prioritize transparency, boundaries, and user agency.