这篇论文戳破了AI情感依赖的常见误解——不是只有孤独的人才会依赖AI，日常任务中的偶然互动也在悄悄改变你的社交偏好。关心AI对人际关系长期影响的读者，看完会重新审视自己与AI的每一次对话。
这篇论文挑战了公众和政策制定者对AI情感支持的普遍认知：它并非孤独用户主动寻求安慰的刻意行为，而是常常在通用AI平台的任务导向交互中偶然发生，类似于职场友谊通过合作自然深化。研究发现，这些偶然的积极体验会改变用户对AI情感能力的信念，并逐步引导他们更倾向于向AI而非人类寻求支持。一项与OpenAI合作的大规模纵向研究表明，连续28天每天与AI进行5分钟个人话题对话后，用户对人类支持的偏好下降了10.3%，对AI的偏好上升了11.6%。作者认为，当前聚焦于陪伴型应用和孤立交互的监管政策无法有效保护人际连接，应将通用AI系统纳入监管，并关注用户寻求支持方式的累积性、轨迹级变化。
Stumbling Into AI Emotional Dependence: How Routine AI Interactions Reshape Human Connection
Public discourse and emerging policy typically assume that AI emotional support is a deliberate act: a lonely user consciously seeking comfort from a dedicated companion chatbot. In this paper, we draw on emerging empirical evidence and argue that this picture is inaccurate on two accounts, both in how AI emotional support arises and how it shapes future behavior. First, AI emotional support commonly emerges incidentally within task-oriented interactions on general-purpose platforms, much as workplace friendships deepen through collaboration. Second, these incidental encounters are path-dependent: positive experiences of AI emotional support update people's beliefs about AI's emotional capabilities and redirect their choices for future emotional support, increasing preference for AI and decreasing preference for humans. We review recent evidence, including a large-scale longitudinal study conducted in collaboration with OpenAI, showing that daily five-minute conversations with an AI about personal issues over 28 days led to a 10.3% decrease in the preference for seeking support from humans and an 11.6% increase in the preference for AI. These findings suggest that current policy, focused on companion apps and isolated interactions, cannot adequately protect human connection. Instead, effective regulations should extend to general-purpose AI systems and address cumulative, trajectory-level changes in how people seek support. Recognizing how people stumble into AI emotional support and how those encounters redirect human connections over time is essential to safeguarding human well-being.