AI-enabled social support chatbot usage: flowing ambivalence and liminalities

Hajer Kefi (), Insaf Khelladi, Zied Mani () and Nathalie Veg-Sala ()
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Hajer Kefi: DVHE - De Vinci Higher Education
Insaf Khelladi: DVHE - De Vinci Higher Education
Zied Mani: UPN - Université Paris Nanterre, CEROS - Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur les Organisations et la Stratégie - UPN - Université Paris Nanterre
Nathalie Veg-Sala: CEROS - Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur les Organisations et la Stratégie - UPN - Université Paris Nanterre

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Abstract: Interest in social and emotional support chatbots has recently surged, making human – chatbot relationships increasingly common. However, users' subjective experiences with these chatbots often extend beyond simple interactions, reflecting the complex dynamics of liminality and ambivalence. Through a netnographic study of the chatbot Replika, we explore how users experience relational liminality, and control and agency liminality. These dynamics contribute to what we term flowing ambivalence, where users feel both comforted and unsettled, fostering dependency on chatbots despite an awareness of their artificial empathy. Our findings suggest that emotional support chatbots provoke complex emotional states that fluctuate and adapt, underscoring the need for nuanced frameworks to understand how users relate to AI tools.

Keywords: Social chatbot artificial intelligence Posthumanism ambivalence; Social chatbot; artificial intelligence; Posthumanism; ambivalence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-12-24
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05492651v1
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Published in Journal of Decision Systems, 2024, pp.1 - 24. ⟨10.1080/12460125.2024.2443226⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05492651

DOI: 10.1080/12460125.2024.2443226

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