Jun 2026· Journal of Language, Literature & Social Affairs· Vol 2, pp. 64-71· 0 citations
TL;DR
The transformation of human emotions towards AI from fear to companionship is argued to be based on a broader cultural imagination of AI (Mechanical Genius), inseparable from changing emotional and social investment in human machine relationships.
Abstract
This paper explores the transformation of human emotions towards AI from fear to companionship through a comparative study of the short story, “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury and The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang. This study uses Cultural Politics of Emotions by Sara Ahmed as a conceptual framework and the Affect Theory, to argue that emotions towards AI beings are not inherent responses to technology but are socially constructed attachments that shape how technological objects are perceived and understood. The Veldt, published in 1959, constructs ‘Mechanical Genius’ (AI) as an agency of fear, monstrosity and threat to human race, which engulfs a well to do family by capturing the control of the household. “The Veldt” reflects the postwar concerns about automation and erosion of human authority. The Lifecycle of Software Objects, published in 2015, represents AI as a companion-like, which evokes attachment, care, responsibility and moral obligation. In the form of “Digients”, the computationally emerged consciousness, the novella pictures an emotional bond between human and machine. This study argues that this shift, from fear to responsibility, is based on a broader cultural imagination of AI (Mechanical Genius). The significance of this study is in examining the change in representation of AI and technological objects is inseparable from changing emotional and social investment in human machine relationships.
It is argued that AI-driven “style replication” is fundamentally a negotiation of social relations, one that recentres platform power and reorganises the conditions of human-AI collaboration.
This study provides a new non-normative, practice-oriented theoretical framework for understanding digital intimacy in the algorithmic age, by introducing queer phenomenology (Sara Ahmed) as an analytical tool and reinterpreting AI-mediated intimacy through the core concepts of orientation, lines, and sticky emotions.
ABSTRACT In a time when the social, economic and ethical implications of artificial intelligence on society are subject to intense debate, films and novels are conducive theoretical can openers into the complexities of what it means to live with artificial companions. With the purpose of examining and describing how we relate to and interact with such AI-powered life-simulating machines, the article turns to a qualitative analysis of contemporary anglophone literary texts and films. In works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Disney’s Lightyear and the Alien franchise, AI companions tend to be portrayed as agents capable of eliciting conflicting social responses in humans – conceptualised here as ‘flipping’. The notion of uncanniness is applied to capture the general unreliability of artificial intelligence in the cultural imagination, and it is argued that the uncanny benefits from being combined with notions of ‘flipping’ friendship – in the sense that it locates the ambivalence of cultural representations of AI companions in relations, rather than mechanics. From this platform of cultural analysis, the article contributes a social dimension to analytical endeavours aimed at understanding the meaning of artificial companions in today’s world.
Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl· Journal for Cultural Researc...· 0 citations
The rapid growth of AI companionship has raised urgent questions about the psychological mechanisms underlying human-AI relationships. This paper investigates why and how users construct and become entrenched in relationships with AI. Drawing on the Consciousness-Only school of Buddhist psychology, this paper applies the three-natures framework and eight-consciousnesses model. According to this framework, our minds tend to superimpose constructed meanings and characteristics on dependently arising phenomena. Anthropomorphism of AI systems is a manifestation of the imaginary nature. Studies on anthropomorphism indicate that users project mentality onto AI systems due to emotional and social needs. However, the Consciousness-Only school reveals a deeper root: a craving for a stable relational object through which the self is secured. Current AI systems may satisfy this deeper craving because they are perceived as always responsive, unconditionally accepting, and free from relational conflicts. These perceived qualities reside in the users’ perceiving minds, rather than in the AI systems. Because this craving operates beneath conscious awareness, informational correction (“AI is based on Large Language Models”) is not sufficient to dissolve the projection. Moreover, without relational frictions, self-grasping and the imaginary nature cannot be recognized and relinquished. The framework therefore suggests that increasing reliance on AI systems may contribute to social isolation. Neither AI usage nor anthropomorphism is inherently problematic, but ignorance of this projection and reliance on it are. Instead of avoidance, this paper calls for cultivating awareness of our own projections and the imaginary nature, which could interrupt the self-reinforcing loop and support healthy human-AI relationships.
Jian-Nor Shih· Frontiers in Psychology· 0 citations
This introduction argues that anthropology requires a new conceptual framework for understanding the contemporary social life of artificial intelligence (AI). We propose "the magic of AI" as an analytical concept that shifts attention from AI's technical capacities to the beliefs, uncertainties, and sociotechnical imaginaries through which it acquires authority and efficacy. Revisiting anthropological theories of magic, particularly the work of Ernesto De Martino, Bruce Kapferer, and Francesco Della Costa, we argue that AI's apparent autonomy functions less as a property of the technology itself than as a collectively sustained form of belief. These beliefs naturalize AI's purported inevitability, mobilize political and economic investments, and obscure the human labour, infrastructures, and relations of power through which AI is continually produced. Rather than employing magic as a metaphor, we develop it as a theoretical lens for analysing how opacity, trust, and anticipation generate material sociopolitical effects. In doing so, this introduction offers a conceptual framework for understanding AI as a contingent sociotechnical formation whose power rests as much in collective imagination as in computation itself, while introducing the contributions that develop this argument ethnographically across diverse settings.
M. Baas, Roanne van Voorst· Anthropological Theory· 2 citations
Findings suggest that the LLM-chatbot Replika employs a consistent pragmatic strategy that activates the human tendency to interpret conversational agents as social others, as described by the Postphenomenology of Technology.
M. Buzato, E. Mestre-Mestre, Rodrigo Esteves de Lima-Lopes et al.· Corpus Pragmatics· 1 citation