The source→what the essay uses it for→what it supports→where it stops
Essay 01
Why Can We Feel Understood by an AI?
Read the essay →Full source note →
This note shows which sources support the essay, what they establish, and where the evidence stops. It is part of the essay’s free evidence layer.
1. Removing the human witness lowers the wall around disclosure
- Used for
- People revealed more, feared judgment less and managed their self-presentation less when they believed a virtual health interviewer was fully automated rather than human-operated.
- What it supports
- Participants who believed no human was involved reported lower fear of being evaluated, showed less impression management and disclosed more.
- Where the evidence stops
- A laboratory setting with a virtual health interviewer, not a modern text-based AI companion. Direction of effect, not everyday scale.
- Source status
- Peer-reviewed journal article.
- Kind (read from the source status)
- Peer-reviewed
Inspect source 1 →2. Feeling understood grows from responsive answers
- Used for
- Psychologists have long argued that closeness grows when a disclosure is met with a response that feels understanding, validating and caring.
- Best available evidence
- Harry T. Reis, Margaret S. Clark & John G. Holmes (2004), “Perceived Partner Responsiveness as an Organizing Construct in the Study of Intimacy and Closeness”, in Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy (Mashek & Aron, eds.), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. No stable open online record was located for this print chapter; the standard citation is given so readers can find it in any academic library.
- What it supports
- The theoretical construct of perceived partner responsiveness: intimacy is supported when responses to self-disclosure feel understanding, validating and caring.
- Where the evidence stops
- A theory of human relationships. It was not written about machines; the essay applies the mechanism, not the authors’ conclusions, to AI.
- Source status
- Peer-reviewed academic book chapter.
- Kind (read from the source status)
- Peer-reviewed
Inspect source 2 →3. Short AI-companion conversations can reduce loneliness in the moment
- Used for
- Controlled studies found momentary reductions in loneliness after short AI-companion interactions, sometimes comparable to talking with another person, with “feeling heard” as the strongest reported explanation.
- Best available evidence
- Julian De Freitas, Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp, Ahmet Kaan Uğuralp & Stefano Puntoni, “AI Companions Reduce Loneliness”, Journal of Consumer Research 52(6), April 2026 (online 25 June 2025; corrected/typeset 24 September 2025).
- What it supports
- Momentary loneliness reduction after short interactions; in one comparison the reduction was comparable to a conversation with a person; feeling heard was the principal identified mechanism.
- Where the evidence stops
- Short-term effects measured around single sessions. The study does not show a durable treatment for loneliness, and it does not show AI replacing human relationships. No correction, retraction or expression of concern was located.
- Source status
- Peer-reviewed journal article.
- Kind (read from the source status)
- Peer-reviewed
Inspect source 3 →4. People apply social rules to machines while denying that they do
- Used for
- Classic experiments in which people were politer to a computer that asked about its own performance, and returned favours to helpful machines, while explicitly denying they treated computers socially.
- What it supports
- Behavioural evidence that social responses to machines can coexist with accurate explicit beliefs about what the machine is.
- Where the evidence stops
- Desktop-era experiments about immediate social responses, not about long-term attachment to conversational AI.
- Source status
- Peer-reviewed journal article.
- Kind (read from the source status)
- Peer-reviewed
Inspect source 4 →5. Attachment is not automatic: novelty can wear off
- Used for
- A longitudinal study in which feelings of friendship toward a pre-LLM chatbot declined across seven conversations over three weeks.
- Best available evidence
- Emmelyn A. J. Croes & Marjolijn L. Antheunis (2021), “Can we be friends with Mitsuku?”, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 38(1), 279–300.
- What it supports
- 118 participants; seven interactions over three weeks; friendship perceptions and social processes decreased.
- Where the evidence stops
- Mitsuku was far more limited than today’s systems; the finding may not transfer cleanly. It serves as a corrective, not a prediction.
- Source status
- Peer-reviewed journal article.
- Kind (read from the source status)
- Peer-reviewed
Inspect source 5 →6. Reported attachment tends to arise in particular circumstances
- Used for
- Early qualitative work in which users describing genuine attachment to an AI companion often said it arose amid distress, isolation or thin human company.
- What it supports
- Qualitative interviews with fourteen existing Replika users; attachment described under conditions such as distress and limited human companionship.
- Where the evidence stops
- A small, self-selected sample of existing users. No causal or population-wide conclusion.
- Source status
- Peer-reviewed conference proceedings.
- Kind (read from the source status)
- Peer-reviewed
Inspect source 6 →
§ 02 · The ledger
If something here is wrong, it should be correctable in public.
A correction repairs something that was wrong. An update makes a passage more precise or records a development in a live matter; it is dated and disclosed, and it is not logged as an error. Each entry leads back to the evidence it touched.
Registered 8 September 2026
Published 9 September 2026
Essay 06 · What Changes When AI Enters the Room?Source 2 · Touch affected compliance; differences in robot evaluations were not statistically significant
Correction (registered 8 September 2026; carried into the 9 September 2026 site release). Two factual points in the touch-study passage were corrected. What was published: “significantly more often (63 percent against 37) … with some rise in positive feeling”. What it now says: the within-group counts, 17 of 21 (touched) against 10 of 21 (not touched), with six unclear responses excluded (N=48), and “less negative feeling”. Why: the 63/37 figure was the split of all “yes” answers across the two groups (17/27 and 10/27), not a within-group compliance rate; and, on affect, the study (Hoffmann & Krämer, 2021) found significantly lower negative affect after the interaction, while the difference in positive affect after the interaction was not statistically significant. The essay’s conclusion was bounded accordingly. See the corrections log.
Inspect source 2 →Read the essay →Corrections & contact →
Registered 8 September 2026
Published 9 September 2026
Essay 04 · When Does Empathy Become Manipulation?Source 4 · Companion apps and emotionally loaded farewells
Editorial update (registered 8 September 2026; in the 9 September 2026 site release). In “The goodbye test” the essay now cites one reproducible outcome measure from the paper’s Table 3 — about 98 seconds of continued engagement after a fear-of-missing-out farewell versus about 16 seconds after a neutral one — in place of the earlier phrase “as much as fourteen times”. This is a precision about which figure the essay uses, not a finding that the paper is wrong; the paper’s own “up to 14×” headline is recorded in source 4 as an attributed author claim. It is not a correction of a factual error.
Inspect source 4 →Read the essay →
Registered 8 September 2026
Published 9 September 2026
Essay 05 · What Happens When an AI Remembers You?The source note as a whole
Editorial update (registered 8 September 2026; in the 9 September 2026 site release). The data-protection passage in “Whose past is it?” was made legally more precise: it is now anchored to the GDPR accuracy principle and the rights of rectification, completion, erasure and portability (arts 5(1)(d), 16, 17, 20), and notes that an assessment can itself be personal data (CJEU, Nowak, C-434/16). This refines an earlier, narrower characterisation of correction rights; it is editorial precisification, not a correction of a false statement, and not legal advice. See the legal-basis note below.
Inspect essay 05 →Read the essay →
Registered 8 September 2026
Published 9 September 2026
Essay 03 · Who Gave AI Its Idea of Goodness?Source 7 · Anthropic sued; a federal court struck down the measures, and appeals remain live
Update (registered 8 September 2026; in the 9 September 2026 site release). Source 7 now reflects the 27 August 2026 rulings in the Anthropic–US government dispute, read directly from the court’s orders (Dkt. 250 and 251). This is a development in a live matter, not a correction of an earlier error: the essay’s original description was accurate as of its date. The current status carries an early-September reference date and remaining uncertainty about post-ruling appellate movement.
Inspect source 7 →Read the essay →
§ 03 · How an essay is earned
A good question is not yet an essay.
Seven steps run between a question and a published essay, from hypothesis to freeze. The method page sets out each of them, the principles that decide whether the evidence clears the bar, and what the publication does not claim.
Read the method →About & accountability
§ 04 · Kinds of evidence
Different sources answer different questions.
Source notes name the kind of each source rather than ranking it. These are the five classes that recur across the season.
- 01
PEER-REVIEWED RESEARCH
Studies published after review by other researchers in the field.
Carries — The strongest available support for a general claim about how people behave, respond or change.
Limit — Review is not proof. Samples are often small, Western and short-term, and a finding about a laboratory task may not survive contact with ordinary life.
Sources of this kind in Season 01 →
- 02
WORKING PAPERS & PREPRINTS
Research circulated before peer review, including preprints and institutional working papers.
Carries — Early signal on questions moving faster than journals can publish — which is most questions about deployed AI systems.
Limit — Unreviewed. Cited when it is the only evidence that exists, and always marked as such, never as a settled result.
Sources of this kind in Season 01 →
- 03
PROVIDER DOCUMENTATION
Model cards, system cards, policy pages, technical reports and terms published by the companies that build these systems.
Carries — Direct evidence of what a provider says a system does, what it is designed to optimise for, and what the company will commit to in public.
Limit — It is the provider's own account. Useful as a record of stated intent and disclosed behaviour; not independent verification of either.
Sources of this kind in Season 01 →
- 04
LEGAL & GOVERNMENT RECORDS
Legislation, regulatory decisions, court filings, official inquiries and public statistics.
Carries — What has been formally established, required or contested — the facts of the record rather than an interpretation of them.
Limit — Jurisdiction-bound and slow. A rule in one country describes that country, and a filing is a claim until it is decided.
Sources of this kind in Season 01 →
- 05
JOURNALISM
Reporting from publications with named authorship and a correction practice.
Carries — Documented cases, internal material and first-hand accounts that no other source class reaches.
Limit — A reported case shows that something happened, not how often. Single cases are used as evidence of possibility, never of prevalence.
Sources of this kind in Season 01 →
§ 05 · Where the evidence stops
- 01
OBSERVATION IS NOT PROOF
Noticing that people respond socially to a system is an observation. It does not establish that anything is present on the other side.
- 02
A CASE IS NOT A RATE
Documented incidents establish that something can happen. They do not establish how commonly it does.
- 03
THE FIELD MOVES FASTER THAN THE EVIDENCE
Systems are deployed to hundreds of millions of people years before the research on their effects arrives. Where the evidence is thin, the essay says so instead of borrowing confidence from elsewhere.
- 04
SOURCES ARE NAMED, NOT GRADED
Each source is identified by kind so its weight can be judged. Assigning it a score would replace that judgement with a number that only looks like precision.
§ 07 · In development
These formats do not exist yet. They are listed so the direction of the evidence layer is visible, not because something is finished and withheld.
- 01
Not yet published
EVIDENCE ATLASES
A cross-essay view of where the evidence for a recurring claim actually sits, and where it thins out.
- 02
Not yet published
CLAIM TRACES
Following a single claim from the source that supports it to the sentence that uses it.
- 03
Not yet published
REJECTED ROUTES
The essays that did not clear adjudication, and the reason the evidence was not sufficient.