Tool or Companion? Reframing Conversational AI to Prevent Psychological Harm

What it is

An April 2026 PsyArXiv paper by Asia Maurich Novelli, Sukhi Shergill and Andreia Sofia Teixeira on people using chatbots like Replika, Character.ai, ChatGPT and Claude for companionship and emotional support. Drawing on AI, psychiatry, psychology and network science, it describes how emotional reliance develops and argues that treating these systems as social companions rather than tools carries risks, especially for vulnerable users.

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