In case you’ve missed the synthetic relationships panel at ETMAAL 2026 conference, this post summarizes our discussion that is led by the panelists (Ruud Hortensius, Elly Konijn, and Chris Starke) and followed by the audience comments. People talk to AI chatbots and socialize with these artificial partners. We call Human-AI relationships “synthetic relationships”, but we don’t have concrete criteria to distinguish a bunch of interactions from a relationship. This is not very surprising, given...