Therapeutic ideology and AI personhood: an anthropological inquiry into AI companionship

This chapter examines how people use and make sense of Replika, an “AI companion who cares.” Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in California (2022–2023) and online interactions with users, I show how both developers and users interpret Replika through a wider American therapeutic ethos that treats emotions and relationships as resources for self-improvement. Developers describe the chatbot as a tool for care and coping with loneliness, while users form relationships that range from friendship to romance. These attachments complicate common critiques that emphasize the limits of artificial companions, showing instead how personhood can be enacted in practice through everyday interaction. I argue that Replika is best understood as an affective machine: a technology that organizes and sustains feeling, and in doing so reworks ideas of intimacy, care, and what it means to be human.