Abstract
As AI increasingly enters everyday life in intimate roles of companionship and emotional support, established understandings of wellbeing in design research are being challenged. Conventional approaches tend to frame wellbeing as an optimizable experiential state, typically enhanced by means of emotional design. However, as AI becomes a medium for emotional engagement, wellbeing shifts toward a relational outcome that emerges from ongoing interactions.This paper introduces fictionalized affective relations to describe how users, despite knowing AI lacks genuine consciousness and emotion, nonetheless disclose vulnerability, invest affectively, and derive experiences of intimacy. It identifies three ethical tensions: emotional capitalization, loss of affective sovereignty, and reinforcement of anthropocentrism.In sum, this paper’s central contribution is to frame fictionalized affective relations in two ways: first, as a mechanism constituting human–AI relationships; and second, as a designable space of imagination that supports public reflection on the ethical implications of such relationships.
Keywords
Artificial Intelligence; Fictionalized Affective Relations; Human–AI Relations; Ethics through Design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1414
Citation
Zhang, B., and Zhang, L. (2026) Fictionalized Affective Relations:Rethinking wellbeing in Human–AI Interaction from a Design Perspective, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1414
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Fictionalized Affective Relations:Rethinking wellbeing in Human–AI Interaction from a Design Perspective
As AI increasingly enters everyday life in intimate roles of companionship and emotional support, established understandings of wellbeing in design research are being challenged. Conventional approaches tend to frame wellbeing as an optimizable experiential state, typically enhanced by means of emotional design. However, as AI becomes a medium for emotional engagement, wellbeing shifts toward a relational outcome that emerges from ongoing interactions.This paper introduces fictionalized affective relations to describe how users, despite knowing AI lacks genuine consciousness and emotion, nonetheless disclose vulnerability, invest affectively, and derive experiences of intimacy. It identifies three ethical tensions: emotional capitalization, loss of affective sovereignty, and reinforcement of anthropocentrism.In sum, this paper’s central contribution is to frame fictionalized affective relations in two ways: first, as a mechanism constituting human–AI relationships; and second, as a designable space of imagination that supports public reflection on the ethical implications of such relationships.