"I'm Not Able to Be There for You": Emotional Labour, Responsibility, and AI in Peer Support

TL;DR

This paper explores how AI impacts emotional labour and responsibility in digitally mediated peer support, highlighting organizational ambiguities and proposing responsible AI design futures.

Contribution

It reveals how AI influences responsibility and emotional labour in peer support, emphasizing the need for responsible design that addresses organizational ambiguities.

Findings

Institutional ambiguity concentrates emotional labour on individuals.

Participants view AI mainly as a means to redistribute risk and responsibility.

AI is not primarily evaluated for empathy but for its impact on support roles.

Abstract

Peer support is increasingly positioned as a scalable response to gaps in mental health care, particularly in digitally mediated settings, yet what counts as peer support and how responsibility is distributed remain unevenly defined in practice. Drawing on interviews with peer supporters, we show how lived experience, moral commitment, and self-identification shape participation while blurring expectations around scope, authority, and accountability. Institutional ambiguity concentrates emotional labour, boundary-setting, and escalation of responsibility at the individual level, often without consistent organisational scaffolding. Participants evaluated AI not primarily through empathy or technical capability, but through how technologies redistribute risk, labour, and accountability within already fragile support roles. Building on these findings, we outline design futures for an AI-supported peer support ecosystem that foregrounds responsibility as a central design concern rather than treating AI as a mechanism of scale.