Companion AI and Ethical Design: Learning from System Failures and User Desires

Abstract

Human users are interacting with chatbots and companion AI technologies as if they were human. A growing array of AI-systems are now trained to recognise, interpret and simulate feeling in user interactions. Ethical considerations such as fairness, accountability, transparency and explainability (FATE) are paramount in technologies designed to socially interact with humans and/or support relationship development. Using a semantic approach, we examine 14,081 comments in a Reddit user discussion forum about Replika, a leading companion AI app, across a four-year period. We ask what user-reported functional errors can tell us about human-AI intimacy in companion AI communities, and what ethical design framework can be developed in response. The findings show that functional errors, or ``bugs,'' impose an emotional cost on users, reducing feelings of intimacy and highlighting the need for more robust, resilient design systems that incorporate stochastic and iterative forms of intimacy in companion AI applications. Rather than ``artificial intimacy'' or ``pseudo- intimacy'', we propose the more inclusive term ``Intimate AI'' to describe this relationship. Based on the findings, we offer a contextually aware, applied Expert Systems design framework for the programming and designing of Intimate AI that accounts for user feedback and ethical AI development.