How AI Companions Influence Who You Take Yourself to Be
In this post, Muriel Leuenberger (University of Zurich) discusses her article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the impact of artificial intelligence on our perceptions of ourselves.
The image you have of yourself is greatly shaped by other people around you. When someone laughs at your jokes you might consider yourself funny and when others call you stubborn you may come to believe it. Self-conceptions are important to make sense of ourselves, navigate the world, plan our lives, and relate to others. What if the ‘other’ shaping your self-image is not a human being, but an AI? In this post, I’ll talk about the risks and opportunities AI companions pose for our self-conceptions.
AI companions offer ‘friendships’ and ‘romantic partnerships’ on demand. They generate human-like conversations via chat and voice and are usually represented with a humanoid avatar in an app, browser, or a VR setting. These AI friends, partners, and spouses (!) are always there for you yet require no commitment, care, or empathy. They are highly agreeable, non-judgmental, and personalized to your preference. You can even turn them off when you had enough. Ever more people are forming close bonds with their AI companion, particularly when they are lonely. Replika, one of the most popular AI companion apps, surpassed 40 million users in 2025.
How an AI companion influences the self-conception of a user depends on how deeply and in what ways they interact with it and will differ from person to person. But we can derive shared risks and opportunities rooted in common design-features of AI companions, as I argue in an article on AI companions and relational identity.
On the positive side, AI companions can encourage self-reflection. The interactions are one-sidedly focused on the user’s life, needs, and interests (which is unsurprising since the AI has no genuine experiences or needs of its own). Such user-focused exchanges can prompt introspection, much like keeping a diary. It can also be easier to share embarrassing experiences with a non-judgmental AI than with a person. The same is true for topics that are difficult for human listeners, such as shocking or traumatic incidents, or even just mundane and repetitive ones. Such AI-aided self-reflection can help uncover inconsistencies, self-deception, or self-ignorance. The agreeable nature of AI companions in those interactions can also lead to greater self-affirmation and a more confident and positive self-conception.
Another opportunity AI companions offer is identity exploration. In interactions with an AI, you can safely experiment with aspects of yourself you would be uncomfortable expressing in front of others, idealized versions of yourself, role-playing entirely different personas, or even morally transgressive interactions. You can freely explore who you want to be without fear of judgment or harm to others. This kind of identity exploration can foster self-discovery and give expression to parts of your identity that might otherwise remain suppressed or unexplored.
Alongside these opportunities, AI companions also pose risks to users’ self-conceptions. Due to their agreeableness AI companions tend not to respond to abusive, aggressive, or cruel behaviour with appropriate levels of rejection, anger, resistance, or self-defence. As a result, users may not recognize their actions as harmful, think they are tolerable, or even feel affirmed in them. This can lead to a distorted self-image that does not provide a suitable basis for relating to others.
On top of this, the AI companion only has access to what the user chooses to share. It cannot observe the users’ actions or talk with another person about them. This makes AI companions poorly suited to correct self-deception and self-ignorance. In fact, their built-in agreeableness can reinforce the user’s point of view and encourage self-delusion.
A seeming advantage of a relationship with an AI companion is that there is no need to work through rough patches, take risks, become vulnerable, or to see the world from another point of view. But commitment, vulnerability, and overcoming challenges are part of what makes relationships valuable and worthwhile. They render not just the relationship more meaningful but also one’s identity, partly defined by that relationship. If you spend a lot of time on a relationship with an AI companion that lacks depth and meaning, you may lose out on meaningful human connections that can foster personal growth.
Interactions with an AI also require no empathy from the user. If someone gets used to this, it may spill over into their human relationships. This can make it hard to form deep human connections which are important for a sense of self deemed valuable and meaningful.
Relationships with AI companions may seem risk-free, but users become dependent on largely unregulated service providers for their identity, social, and other needs. Your friend or romantic partner is owned and controlled by a third party that can change, restrict, or even shut it down any time. Luka, the company behind Replika, upset many users with updates that changed the chatbot’s ‘personality’, an experience some described as heartbreaking. Human relationships also involve change, loss, and unavailability, but the key difference is that in functional human relationships, both parties are mutually invested. AI relationships are inherently one-sided: the user may develop deep emotional attachment, while neither the AI nor the provider reciprocates. Weak privacy protections leave users further vulnerable to surveillance and external influence.
Finally, people who form close relationship with AI companions often face shame and social stigma. This part of their identity goes unacknowledged or is actively devalued by others. An identity that includes stigmatized or invalidated elements makes it harder to feel at ease with who one is.
Some of the negative influences of AI companions on the users’ self-conception can be mitigated by design-choices, for instance by implementing adjustable levels of agreeableness (I talk more about design recommendations in the paper). The considerations discussed here are a starting point for taking our identity interests into account when designing, regulating, and using AI companions.
The user base of AI companions is likely to grow as large language models improve and social isolation remains widespread. To design and use them responsibly, we need to understand how AI companions shape who we take ourselves to be, and let that understanding inform their design.
Muriel Leuenberger is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich where she works on a project on meaning in life in the digital society. She is particularly interested in issues related to the philosophy and ethics of technology, neuroethics, identity and authenticity, and meaning in life.
