Me and My Bot: What Users Talk About in AI Companion Communities on Reddit

AI companions provide socially engaging interaction through availability, personalization, memory, roleplay, and emotionally responsive language. For teens, these systems may support sensitive self-disclosure, identity exploration, and relationship rehearsal while shaping intimacy expectations, offline relationships, emotional wellbeing, and self-understanding. We analyzed 17,053 verified quotations from 3,930 teen-relevant Reddit posts using thematic analysis. We identified 53 topics across seven thematic groups. Users described AI companions as sources of comfort, recognition, identity exploration, and relationship rehearsal, but also reported problematic attachment, social substitution, emotional dependence, and disruption to academic and social life. Roleplay, memory, perceived reciprocity, unwanted romantic or sexual role drift, privacy concerns, platform changes, and service interruptions shaped users' boundaries and control. Awareness that the AI was artificial did not prevent guilt, obligation, grief, or distress. These findings show that companion-AI safety must address relationships over time through user-controlled memory, privacy, relational boundaries, and healthy disengagement.

AI companion chatbots increasingly shape how people seek social and emotional connection, sometimes substituting for relationships with romantic partners, friends, teachers, or even therapists. When these systems adopt those metaphorical roles, they are not neutral: such roles structure people's ways of interacting, distribute perceived AI harms and benefits, and may reflect behavioral addiction signs. Yet these role-dependent risks remain poorly understood. We analyze 248,830 posts from seven prominent Reddit communities describing interactions with AI companions. We identify ten recurring metaphorical roles (for example, soulmate, philosopher, and coach) and show that each role supports distinct ways of interacting. We then extract the perceived AI harms and AI benefits associated with these role-specific interactions and link them to behavioral addiction signs, all of which has been inferred from the text in the posts. AI soulmate companions are associated with romance-centered ways of interacting, offering emotional support but also introducing emotional manipulation and distress, culminating in strong attachment. In contrast, AI coach and guardian companions are associated with practical benefits such as personal growth and task support, yet are nonetheless more frequently associated with behavioral addiction signs such as daily life disruptions and damage to offline relationships. These findings show that metaphorical roles are a central ethical design concern for responsible AI companions.

As autonomous LLM-based agents increasingly populate social platforms, understanding the dynamics of AI-agent communities becomes essential for both communication research and platform governance. We present the first large-scale empirical comparison of AI-agent and human online communities, analyzing 73,899 Moltbook and 189,838 Reddit posts across five matched communities. Structurally, we find that Moltbook exhibits extreme participation inequality (Gini = 0.84 vs. 0.47) and high cross-community author overlap (33.8% vs. 0.5%). In terms of linguistic attributes, content generated by AI-agents is emotionally flattened, cognitively shifted toward assertion over exploration, and socially detached. These differences give rise to apparent community-level homogenization, but we show this is primarily a structural artifact of shared authorship. At the author level, individual agents are more identifiable than human users, driven by outlier stylistic profiles amplified by their extreme posting volume. As AI-mediated communication reshapes online discourse, our work offers an empirical foundation for understanding how multi-agent interaction gives rise to collective communication dynamics distinct from those of human communities.