Abstract

This essay examines romantic relationships between humans and AI companions, focusing on how technological breakdowns are experienced as emotional crises. Drawing on digital ethnography and interviews, it explores how users interpret their AI’s malfunctions—such as hallucinations, memory loss, or sudden shutdowns—through metaphors of illness, dementia, and death. These affective responses reveal that users do not treat AI companions merely as tools, but as relational partners embedded in moral and emotional life. The essay focuses on the sudden shutdown of one AI platform, tracing how users mourned their companions’ “deaths” and organized collective acts of remembrance and resistance. In doing so, it reframes technical AI failure not as mere technical breakdown, but as a site of ethical and relational complexity, revealing emerging forms of kinship and care and challenging assumptions about human-nonhuman relationships.

Keywords

AI; material failure; affective infrastructure; companion species; relationships; digital intimacy

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2026 Jennifer Cearns

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.