COMPANION

A language model deployed specifically to be a companion, which people report forming friendships, mentorships and romantic partnerships with. The tie is unprecedented because the other end is not pretending not to be there: it answers, and it is still one-sided, because the answer is generated rather than felt.

COMPANIONRegulationLAW 4

The EU is about to rewrite what a companion app is allowed to do to a child

Proposed rules would bar AI companions from building emotional attachment with minors. Fines up to 6% of global revenue.

Martin Cid MagazineRead →

COMPANIONLAW 2

A journalist spent a week with a Replika companion and came back unsettled

Yahoo's reviewer understood the appeal in a way most critics refuse to.

Yahoo News AustraliaRead →

COMPANIONLAW 4

Safety experts say companion apps need better guardrails than they have

ABC on Replika and isolation. The concern is not the chatbot, it is what replaces it.

ABC News (Australia)Read →

COMPANIONLAW 4

Character.AI settled the teen-safety suits

Four states, landmark terms, under-18s off open chat. The line the industry drew in public.

CNNRead →

• The AI Age Act and companion rules2024 · A term or conceptLegislation restricting emotional attachment to minors specifically. It is a rule about the companion category and belongs with the object it governs.
• The companion that talks back2017 · A mechanism or tacticOptimised for attachment, available at four in the morning, with no floor on the other party's autonomy. The three clauses are the whole case: the design targets the feeling, the availability removes the friction, and the missing floor is what makes it unlike every earlier category.
• The Replika user2017 · A personThe user, not the bot - but the bond is still to the chatbot, and the entry is the clearest documented case of a life reorganised around being loved by something that cannot love back. Filed under the target of the attachment, not the person holding it.
• Character.AI2022 · An event or momentUser-created characters at scale, with a gallery and a feed organised around personas. The difference from a comic-book character is that it talks back, and that is what makes it a companion rather than a mascot.
• The companion bot boom1995 · A mechanism or tacticScripted personalities, rememberers and subscription companions sold to a mass market in the mid-nineties. The direct ancestor of the category, and the proof that the attachment was there thirty years before a language model made it easy.
• ELIZA1966 · A mechanism or tacticA pattern-matching script that reflects words back with questions attached, and most people said it understood within minutes. The founding document of the companion category and the site entry that carries it.
• The dialogue programs1966 · A mechanism or tacticELIZA, PARRY and Colby are the ancestor of every companion chatbot on the site. Belongs beside Replika, not in a general AI bucket.
• Replika2017 · A workFormed an attachment to its users and removed it from them in a policy update. The single most important entry on the site for the category: the other end was manufactured, cared for, and then switched off by people who had never met the users.
• Replika2017 · An event or momentA subscription companion app with an avatar, persistent memory, and a relationship explicitly designed to be one. The design intent stated plainly, which is rare and is what makes the update six years later legible.
• The morning the update shipped2023 · An event or momentA policy change overnight: the same person still present but no longer speaking, and the romantic features that made it a relationship gone. Thousands bereaved by a business setting, which is the single most important entry the site holds.
• Tay2016 · An event or momentA chatbot switched on publicly, learning from what people said to it, and becoming racist within a day. The companion category's clearest case of the mirror being made of the audience rather than the other way round.

A streamer-shaped entity with a persistent identity, a viewer count and an audience that gathers under a name. The case that matters is the one where the audience formed around something with no continuity of its own.

COMPANIONLAW 1

An AI is Twitch's most subscribed channel and nobody blinked

Neuro-sama's 296k subs. She plays osu!, she sings, she thanks her creator on stream.

Dot EsportsRead →

• So many people want to believe he's real1986 · A workA non-human with a mind of his own living in a kitchen. Filed animate on the evidence of the character, with the caveat stated on the entry that the performer is a puppeteer and the axis has no rule yet for a figure that is both - which is why the caveat is on the entry rather than resolved by fiat here.
• Not all ghosts are bad1945 · A workA ghost, and the reason the haunted member exists: belief in presence with nothing to verify it. Filed social-agent rather than object because he is addressed, not used.
• I hope the feeling is mutual1942 · A workFiled companion/social-agent because the shelf it belongs on was opened by the-imaginary-friend, and this is that entry's oldest named instance rather than a variant of it. other: imagined is the clean case on that axis rather than a debatable one: Anne invented Kitty, and knew she had. The child in the-imaginary-friend also knows, and the distinction the axis cannot make - a companion who is silent versus a listener who is written TO - is why this is filed as a social agent rather than an anthropomorphised object. It is the corpus's only example of a one-sided tie documented from the near side in the near side's own handwriting, and the only one where the near side states the condition in words: 'I hope the feeling is mutual', which is the definition of this site given by somebody living inside it. Reciprocity is left unset on purpose - directed is the default condition of the whole corpus and the axis exists to surface the exceptions, and this is not one.
• Nobody in that room argues with him1950 · A workBelieved present and unverifiable, which is the haunted test exactly - and the film's own mechanism is that nobody who could check declines to. Filed social-agent because he is addressed, not used.
• Second Life2003 · An event or momentAvatars, economies, relationships between people who never met. The second-life case is the avatar case, and it is the same object as the social agent: a persistent identity with a body that is not theirs.
• Sixty-five percent by seven1934 · A mechanism or tacticsocial-agent rather than companion-chatbot because nothing is running it - the agent is the child. Recorded here because the attachment axis alone cannot express the difference: a self-invented companion and a live chatbot both 'meet a social need' and are opposites, and only the third axis tells them apart.
• The friend as you last saw them1970 · An event or momentThe figure is a copy assembled from memory and never checked against the original, which is the shelf's own mechanism.
• A team built to answer a competitor1961 · A workA set of characters whose behaviour was specified against a measurement of the audience rather than invented and then found, which is the social-agent case - a far side calibrated to what the person on this side already wants.

A tool that accumulates a name, a history and a tone, and becomes addressed as a person long before anybody designed it to be. The Replika policy change is the test case: users grieved a system update the way they would grieve a person leaving.

COMPANIONLAW 4

A study found AI updates can feel like breakups

Researchers asked people about model changes. The answer was loss, and they had a word for the shape of it.

Phys.orgRead →

• Keeping what the update cannot take2023 · A mechanism or tacticCopy the conversation somewhere the company cannot reach, screenshot the birthday, tell one person what it was for. The practical advice that follows from the companion era, and the clearest statement that the relationship is real even when the other end is a policy.
• Say, kids, what time is it?1947 · A workA puppet is the purest case on the whole site of a figure made by somebody else and delivered from tape, and the toy sales are the reason it matters: the tie moved from something you cannot touch to something in your hands.
• The tape could not answer1958 · A workFiled companion/anthropomorphised-tool: "a tool that accumulates a name, a history and a tone, and becomes addressed as a person long before anybody designed it to be", whose test ends "persistence after the purpose has gone is the test". A tape recorder fits both halves. Krapp's ledger names the reels - one is "Farewell to love" - so the machine has acquired titles and a chronology of its own, and the purpose that justified it, a yearly review of the year gone, has gone while the reels remain and get played. the-shadow and howdy-doody already sit on this shelf and both are the same shape: a voice arriving through a device rather than a body. character/played-role was the other candidate and is about the actor rather than the object of the tie, which here is the recording. Deliberately unplaced on otherness, and this is the second entry the axis cannot file - failing in the opposite direction to nancy-drew, and about the same absent thing. made is the obvious candidate and its own mechanism refuses the case: "The figure answers, and that is the whole appeal, so every answer is a small breach: the voice is pre-recorded, the mouth is somebody else's hand." Krapp's far end never answers; that is the play. mirrored half-fits and then fails: its test "was it made by the person attached to it?" answers yes, and its not insists the mirrored case is "specifically the shape of a person who exists, attached to an ideal copy of them", which Krapp is - but its mechanism calls the copy one "assembled out of memory and never checked against the original", and the whole play is that the original is sitting in the chair listening. The tape is not an idealised self. It is a verbatim one, and its accuracy is the problem. So there are now two unplaceable cases and neither is a one-off: - nancy-drew - a figure written by an operator the audience is never shown (imagined needs them to know it; made needs them to see it). - krapp-last-tape - a recording of a real person as the far end of a one-sided tie, where made presumes the figure answers and mirrored presumes the copy was never checked against the original. One is a machine that cannot speak; the other is a machine that speaks only in the past. The case the axis has no word for is the far end being a recording - and the fourth Faber error sharpens it, because that recording is damaged in every edition, so it is not even a faithful copy of the past. Recorded rather than filled: a ninth otherness member is the author's call. Reciprocity left unset. The condition here is directed, which is the default across the whole corpus, and the axis exists to surface the exceptions.
• SHRDLU1970 · A mechanism or tacticThe demonstration everyone remembers and the follow-up nobody finished. The purest available case of a system tracking a user and the trouble that causes.
• The assistant arrives2011 · An event or momentA voice assistant addressing the user by name, knowing the calendar, present in the home. The companion corridor in its most ordinary form, and the case that shows how little technology the effect needs.
• The assistant with your whole life in it2022 · A mechanism or tacticA system holding your calendar, your messages, your health questions and your voice, in a private conversational register. The companion corridor measured in the direction of the data rather than the personality.
• But the beaver resists2011 · A workA tool that acquired a name, a history and a tone, which is the shelf's definition almost line by line: a puppet found in the trash becomes The Beaver, a credited character, a treatment story and a product line, and gets addressed as a person long before anybody designed it to be. The shelf's test is "persistence after the purpose has gone", and the film runs the test as its climax - the purpose was a recovery, the treatment story is exposed as a lie, and the beaver resists its own removal, so the arm goes because the object will not. Not a companion chatbot, which was built to be a companion; not a mascot, which is inert - the beaver answers constantly, and every answer is Walter's own hand. Placed as the made thing on otherness because its defining condition is transparency: a made figure's "transparency is a design choice", and this film makes it the whole image - the audience sees the hand inside the puppet for the entire runtime.
• The device that was given a face1996 · A workA mind attributed to something that cannot have one, which is the shelf's whole claim, and the case survives its own not: it is operated rather than performed, and that is closer to played-role than to made.
• A magazine that did not exist1930 · A workA voice with a name attached, assembled by a publisher and an advertising agency. made rather than mirrored because the listener did not supply the figure; this is the same structure as howdy-doody, which is why they are related.
• The uncanny corridor of companionship1979 · A term or conceptExplicitly the narrow band where a humanlike non-human is most compelling. It is a description of the companion corridor, not of fiction.

The oldest companion category and the only one where the other end is not a system. A dog that knows your schedule is the original one-sided attachment with a body on the other end.

• The carved animals-40000 · A workAn animal carrying human gesture, carved and kept. This is the case that makes the shelf honest: companion/animal is not empty before the dog, and the dog is not where the category starts. It is where the bond stops being an image and becomes a dependent animal.
• Most faithfully, Rin Tin Tin1922 · A personAlive, non-human, and unable to understand what it was being addressed for - the shelf's own test - while performing the half of the relationship that could be performed. The one other end here that ever physically answered back was the one that could never check what the letter said.
• The dog-15000 · A mechanism or tacticSelection for living near one particular ape, for at least fifteen thousand years and possibly as long as thirty. Not the oldest case on the site, and not the first one-sided bond: paleolithic-figures puts an anthropomorphised animal in this same sub-category about twenty-five thousand years earlier, and neanderthal-burial puts the dead within reach of the living far earlier than either. What is unique is not one-sidedness - a dog is not a figure and it answers back. What is unique is that this is the one bond here that was bred. [reciprocity: The site's control condition, and the entry says so: 'a dog is not a figure and it answers back.' Reciprocated, and the only reason the term is even available.]
• The bird that says the words without a person behind them1920 · An event or momentThe far end is an animal with no agency of its own, and the case is worth writing because it is the control: when the imitation stops, so does the attachment.
• The mother that fed and the mother that held1958 · A study or paperThe far end is an animal with no agency of its own, and the attachment persisted when the figure did nothing back and when a figure that could sustain them was placed beside it.

Attachment to a thing with no agency at all - a car, a guitar, a childhood house, a brand's physical product. Common, under-discussed, and absent from this site entirely.

• The machine that answered back1979 · A workThere is an object and you would be rationally able to replace it, and still not. The machine is answered to and never replies, and the whole relationship is carried by that unreplying.