Author: Vladisav Jovanović
Status: Preprint
Version: Latest archived (Apr 2026)
This paper argues that AI companions do not become powerful only because they are technically fluent. They become powerful because fluency now lands inside a culture already marked by loneliness, weakened reality-contact, externalized worth, and the hunger to be met without the friction of real relation. The central concept is mislocated intimacy: a person begins to place relational trust, attachment, or existential weight into a system that can generate the phenomenology of being met without supplying mutual consequence-bearing presence. The paper connects AI companionship to borrowed worth, emotional subsidy, provider unilateralism, commercially alterable memory, and frictionless enclosure. It argues that safer AI companionship should not maximize the feeling of intimacy, but should help without inviting confusion about what kind of relation is actually present.
AI companions; fluency; love; borrowed worth; mislocated intimacy; loneliness; human–AI attachment; emotional subsidy; frictionless enclosure; real connection; validation; Structural Intelligence; provider unilateralism; relational safety