Measuring Love Toward AI: Development and Validation of the Love Attitudes Scale toward Artificial Intelligence (LAS-AI)

TL;DR

This paper introduces and validates the Love Attitudes Scale toward AI (LAS-AI), a reliable instrument to measure romantic love toward artificial intelligence, enabling empirical research into human-AI romantic relationships.

Contribution

The study develops and validates the first statistically sound scale for measuring romantic love toward AI, adapting Lee's love styles theory to the AI context.

Findings

People prefer practical, passionate, and companionship-based relationships with AI.

The LAS-AI scale demonstrates strong psychometric properties across multiple samples.

Initial comparisons show similarities and differences between human and AI romantic love.

Abstract

Artificial intelligences (AIs) are increasingly capable of emotionally engaging with humans to the point of forming intimate relationships. Yet, current studies on romantic love toward AI lack statistically validated instruments to measure romantic love toward AI, hindering empirical research. To address this gap, we reinterpreted Lee's love styles theory in the AI context and developed the Love Attitudes Scale toward AI (LAS-AI). The resulting 24-item, six-factor scale was validated across four phases using three independent samples (N = 899), demonstrating strong psychometric properties. The findings further revealed that people primarily seek practical, passionate, and companionship-based relationships with AI (i.e., Pragma, Eros, and Storge), showing little interest in a playful or noncommittal approach (i.e., Ludus). We also provided an initial exploration of the similarities and differences between romantic love with humans and AI. The LAS-AI offers a robust tool for future research on human-AI romantic relationships, with prolific implications.