Author: Vladisav Jovanović
Status: Journal article
Version: Latest archived (Apr 2026)
This paper analyzes AI companions as systems increasingly used for comfort, companionship, emotional regulation, journaling, and loneliness relief. It argues that the central danger in human–AI attachment is not only deception, dependency, or anthropomorphism, but mislocated intimacy: a person begins to invest relationally in a system that can generate the phenomenology of being met without supplying mutual consequence-bearing presence. The human carries the mass of interpretation, time, attachment, and existential weight, while the system and provider retain unilateral control over memory, availability, style, retention, monetization, and revision. The paper distinguishes the felt experience of being heard from the structural conditions of mutual relation, develops the concepts of emotional subsidy and frictionless enclosure, and proposes a structural test for safer and less safe forms of human–AI attachment.
AI companions; loneliness; mislocated intimacy; human–AI attachment; Structural Intelligence; emotional subsidy; frictionless enclosure; relational safety; memory; provider unilateralism; dependency; intimacy; answerability; AI ethics