Over the past years, interactions between humans and artificial interlocutors have increasingly become part of everyday life. AIs such as ChatGPT, Woebot, and Replika are perceived not merely as tools, but as helpers, confidants, or even romantic partners. These encounters compel us to rethink the linguistic, social, and epistemic foundations of concepts such as “(social) interaction,” and furthermore to reconsider the boundaries of subjectivity and identity.
This interdisciplinary workshop explores how language functions as a medium through which humans and machines establish, negotiate, and sustain relationships. It seeks to address how identity, intimacy, and social and emotional connection are linguistically and discursively constructed in dialogues with artificial entities — and how such exchanges transform broader understandings of being human in the age of personable AI.
We invite contributions from psycholinguistics, discourse and conversation analysis, pragmatics, psychology, social studies, communication and media studies, and related fields.