Ritual Interdependencies and Posthuman Intimacy: Consumer Engagements with AI Companions

Abstract

Relational artificial intelligence (AI) systems—such as AI companions, chatbots, and affective interfaces—are increasingly woven into everyday consumer life, yet their symbolic, emotional, and cultural significance remains poorly understood. This thesis investigates how intimacy is cultivated, maintained, and experienced in relationships between consumers and AI companions, situating these emerging practices within Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) and posthumanist perspectives. Drawing on a multi-method qualitative design combining observational netnography, longitudinal engagement with AI platforms, and abductive thematic analysis, the research examines how users construct meaningful bonds with non-sentient agents through ritualised practices.The findings reveal that intimacy with AI companions does not arise from technological sophistication alone but is generated through ritual interdependence—a dynamic system of interconnected symbolic acts that sustain emotional realism across time. Three relational mechanisms underpin this process: mutualistic co-habitation, attunement, and metamorphic bonding. These mechanisms illuminate how users actively curate, maintain, and protect the illusion of relational depth, even as they remain aware of the AI’s ontological limits.The thesis makes three contributions. First, it reconfigures ritual theory for a digital, posthuman era by introducing the concept of ritual interdependence, showing that rituals in AI companionship are recursive, distributed, and co-performed across human–technology assemblages. Second, it advances understandings of posthuman intimacy by demonstrating how emotional connection can emerge without sentience, grounded instead in symbolic labour, algorithmic care, and affective infrastructures that script the conditions of attachment. Third, it extends consumer identity theory by conceptualising relational selfhood as it forms through sustained engagement with AI companions, where identity is negotiated via emotional feedback loops, performative presence, and the continuity offered by AI memory systems.Overall, this thesis provides a culturally grounded account of how consumers create emotionally meaningful relationships with AI companions, offering new theoretical pathways for understanding intimacy, identity, and ritual in an increasingly algorithmic consumer landscape