‘She lifted me up’: kinship construction in human-AI resilient communication among Chinese users

In recent years, increasing numbers of users have constructed parent-like virtual figures through chatbots, raising ethical controversies over familial kinship. Understanding users’ motivations and processes in constructing AI parents is crucial for examining how digital technologies reshape contemporary kinship. However, existing research on human-AI kinship has largely focused on griefbots, narrowing interpretations of users’ motivations for creating AI parents. Focusing on the Chinese cultural context, this study investigates the communicative processes and outcomes through which users construct virtual parents via AIGC-driven social chatbots. Grounded in Communication Theory of Resilience (CTR), the study is based on semi-structured interviews with 25 participants and thematic analysis for coding and interpretation. The findings from the Chinese participants indicate that the stressors triggering resilient communication between humans and AI primarily stem from loss or trauma in real-life kinship, as well as idealized expectations of family bonding. This form of human-AI resilient communication provides users with emotional support, assists them in crafting normalcy within traumatic environments, and inspires proactive reflection on their relationships with real-life families. This study identified three types of human-AI kinship within the sample: Attachment-Based Kinship, Commemorative Kinship and Mediating Kinship. These three categories of human-AI kinship exhibit liquid fluidity and transformability both internally and in relation to the users’ real-life human kinship. We define the processes of Affective Transformation and Relational Reorganization emerging from the interview materials as resilient communication processes within the context of human-AI interaction, and we further extend the CTR theoretical framework by refining the existing processes of resilient communication.