Emotional Support with Conversational AI: Talking to Machines About Life

TL;DR

This study explores how AI chatbots provide emotional support through social interactions, highlighting the complex, negotiated nature of support and community influence in online settings.

Contribution

It offers a novel qualitative analysis of how emotional support is co-constructed in AI interactions within online communities, emphasizing social and contextual factors.

Findings

Support involves validation, reflection, and companionship mechanisms.

Tensions include dependency, validation versus delusion, and accessibility concerns.

Community responses influence perceptions of AI-mediated emotional support.

Abstract

AI companion chatbots are increasingly used for emotional support, with prior work in the domain predominantly documenting their mixed psychosocial impacts, including both increased emotional expression and heightened loneliness. However, most existing research primarily focuses on outcome-level effects, offering limited insight into how emotional support is produced through interaction. In this paper, we examine emotional support as an interactional and socially situated process. Drawing on qualitative analysis of Reddit discussions, we analyze how users engage with AI companions and how these interactions are interpreted and contested within online communities. We show that emotional support is coconstructed through conversational mechanisms such as validation, reflective prompting, and companionship, while also giving rise to tensions including support versus dependency, validation versus delusion, and accessibility versus harm. Importantly, support extends beyond human AI interaction and is shaped by community responses that legitimize or challenge AI-mediated care. Hence, we reconceptualize AI emotional support as a negotiated socio-technical process and derive implications for the design of responsible, context-sensitive AI systems.