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Cited by 13

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 77 of the 77 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Are Measures of Children's Parasocial Relationships Ready for Conversational AI?

Blake, Annabel, Carter, Marcus, Velloso, Eduardo·2025·Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
DOI 10.1145/3715275.3732075
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Abstract

Parasocial scales assume one-sided bonds with media figures—but what happens when the media talks back? The rapid emergence of conversational AI has transformed how children interact with digital characters, yet existing parasocial interaction (PSI) and relationship (PSR) measures are still grounded in passive television viewing. Through a systematic review of 24 studies spanning 1976–2024, we reveal critical gaps in current measurement approaches for understanding child-AI interactions. Our analysis exposes methodological weaknesses, including age-indiscriminate measurement tools, inconsistent conceptualisation of character realism, and an oversimplified positive friendship framework. Existing measures predominantly treat PSRs as unidirectional, static constructs, failing to capture the long-term, reciprocal nature of AI interactions. We identify promising directions for measurement evolution, including the revival of early affective scales, refined behavioural measures, and an expanded relationship taxonomy. This analysis provides an urgent review of current frameworks to help us understand and assess children’s relationships with increasingly sophisticated AI characters.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3715275.3732075

Cites

77 of 77 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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Citations

Cites

Research works printed but not linked: 6

  1. Alex Ambrose. 2024. Policymakers Should Further Study the Benefits & Risks of AI Companions. Technical Report. Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
  2. 10.1007/978-1-4613-3724-934 · DOI
  3. David C. Giles. 2002. Parasocial Interaction: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research. Media Psychology 4 3 (Aug. 2002) 279–305. https://doi.org/10.1207/S1532785XMEP040304 · DOI
  4. 10.5555/1207289 · doi:10.5555/1207289
  5. Jon Porter. 2023. CHATGPT continues to be one of the fastest-growing services ever. https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/6/23948386/chatgpt-active-user-count-openai-developer-conference.
  6. Mohammad Ronagh Nikghalb and Jinghui Cheng. 2024. Interrogating AI: Characterizing Emergent Playful Interactions with ChatGPT. http://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08405 arXiv:https://arXiv.org/abs/2401.08405 [cs]. · arXiv

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Metadata

Authors
Blake, A., Carter, M., & Velloso, E.
Affiliations
  • School of Computer Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
  • School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
ORCID
Venue
Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
Publisher
ACM
Published
2025-06-23
Pages
1145-1158
DOI
10.1145/3715275.3732075
Cited by
13
References
77

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Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.