Pith Number

pith:TJHMJI24

pith:2026:TJHMJI24HN46FF4XYZ25Z44FXB

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Large Language Lovers: Lived Experiences of Negotiating Agency and Platform Control in AI Companionship

Anastasia Kuzminykh, Ashton Anderson, Carolina Nobre, Fanny Chevalier, Jessica Y. Bo, Matthew Varona, Patrick Yung Kang Lee, Paula Akemi Aoyagui, Zixin Zhao

People conceptualize AI companions through an interplay of perceived companion agency, platform autonomy, their interactions, and the companion's initiatives.

arxiv:2601.13188 v3 · 2026-01-19 · cs.HC · cs.CY

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{TJHMJI24HN46FF4XYZ25Z44FXB}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

Individuals conceptualize their companions based on an interplay of their beliefs about the companion's own agency and the autonomy permitted by the platform, how they pursue interactions with the companion, and the perceived initiatives that the companion takes.

C2weakest assumption

That the self-reported experiences from a modest sample of 13 interviews and 43 survey responses, combined with public Reddit posts, accurately capture the internal dynamics and steering strategies of the broader population of AI companion users without significant selection or reporting bias.

C3one line summary

Users form AI companion relationships by negotiating perceived companion agency against platform constraints and use steering tactics like custom instructions or platform switching to cope with model updates that disrupt stability.

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Cited by

1 paper in Pith

"It Felt a Bit Eerie": Exploring Humanlike Interactions During Collaborative Writing with an Artificial Agent

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-02T02:04:13.117139Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

9a4ec4a35c3b79e29797c675dcf385b8630593b7d15a3e4a793134c0b2555df2

Aliases

arxiv: 2601.13188 · arxiv_version: 2601.13188v3 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2601.13188 · pith_short_12: TJHMJI24HN46 · pith_short_16: TJHMJI24HN46FF4X · pith_short_8: TJHMJI24

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/TJHMJI24HN46FF4XYZ25Z44FXB \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 9a4ec4a35c3b79e29797c675dcf385b8630593b7d15a3e4a793134c0b2555df2

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "03a7b3adba50ddf6ebd03d0094f38e7d15ab5085542d8abd99d91b0e2cbf434d",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.CY"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.HC",
    "submitted_at": "2026-01-19T16:11:19Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "4025fd66cb0db59c67dc3b99cf8654d9e0fe650b8736004b6d71758c92208ca5"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2601.13188",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 3
  }
}