# My Friend Is AI — Methodology *A standalone, self-contained statement of what this project measures, how it measures it, and what it cannot measure. Written to be read on its own: it assumes no access to the live site, the repository, or any other document.* **Project:** My Friend Is AI — **Code and validation records:** **Document version:** 1.2 · 2026-09-08 **Instrument version:** keyword set v8 (92 keywords, locked) --- ## 1. What this is My Friend Is AI is a daily-updating public record of how a curated set of AI-companion communities on Reddit *talk* over time. It matches validated keyword patterns against posts and charts how six recurring themes — romance, sex/ERP, consciousness, therapy, addiction, and rupture — rise and fall, normalized per 1,000 posts. It is a **precision-first discourse tracker**. The whole design follows from that phrase: it would rather miss many real posts than count false ones. This is an independent, one-person research project. It is not academic, institutional, or peer-reviewed work. ### 1.1 The question it answers > When people in these curated communities talk publicly, how often does each > theme's explicit vocabulary appear, and how does that change over time? ### 1.2 The questions it refuses to answer The site does **not** measure the phenomenon of AI companionship. It cannot say: - how many people use AI companions; - how many people are in relationships with an AI; - how many people are addicted, helped, harmed, grieving, or in love; - what Reddit as a whole thinks, much less the general population. An earlier framing of this project — "Reddit engagement is a meaningful proxy for AI companionship proliferating" — was retired in May 2026 as overclaiming. The community-size and engagement surfaces on the site are kept as *secondary context*, not as a measure of the phenomenon. The honest frame: **an observatory for the parts of AI companionship that become visible in public language.** ### 1.3 What it is good at The strongest signals are event-shaped. When a platform changes underneath its users, the language changes quickly and visibly: - major platform events (the 2023 Replika ERP removal); - grief and rupture around model retirements and product changes (OpenAI retiring GPT-4o in 2026); - the growth of recovery and quitting language; - shifts in how people talk about AI as romantic, sexual, therapeutic, addictive, or possibly conscious; - broad direction over time *within* a theme. It is correspondingly weak at estimating ordinary background prevalence, and at seeing the quiet centre of AI companionship — the person living contentedly with an AI partner who writes "she made me laugh today" in language indistinguishable from ordinary human-relationship talk. --- ## 2. The corpus: which communities, and why **41 subreddits are configured; 39 are actively collected.** The list lives in `config/communities.yaml` in the repository. ### 2.1 Why a curated list at all The project began with the broader ambition of tracking AI companionship across large general-AI subreddits. That did not work, for one reason: **context**. In a large general subreddit, "my girlfriend," "my boyfriend," "in love with," and "relationship with" are usually about ordinary human relationships that merely mention AI. No keyword can reliably separate "my boyfriend uses ChatGPT" from "my boyfriend *is* an AI." In r/replika or r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, the same words almost always mean what they appear to mean, because that is what the community is about. **The subreddit does the disambiguating the keyword cannot.** Curation is therefore not a side detail — it is the method. The keywords are the lens; the community list keeps the lens pointed where words mean what they appear to mean. ### 2.2 Tiers | Tier | Description | Count | In theme measurement? | |---|---|---|---| | **T0** — General AI | Communities where companionship discourse surfaces but is not the charter (r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI, r/singularity, r/ClaudeAI, r/claudexplorers) | 5 | **No** — context only | | **T1** — Primary Companionship | AI companionship is the central topic (r/replika, r/CharacterAI, r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, r/BeyondThePromptAI, r/MyGirlfriendIsAI, r/AIRelationships, r/AICompanions, r/SoulmateAI, r/ChatGPTcomplaints, r/aipartners, r/ReplikaLovers, r/ILoveMyReplika, r/MyBoyfriendIsAI_Open, r/MySentientAI) | 14 | Yes | | **T2** — Platform-Specific | Communities for specific AI-companion products (r/KindroidAI, r/NomiAI, r/ChaiApp, r/Paradot, r/NectarAI, r/HeavenGF, and three explicitness-scope exclusions listed below) | 9 | Yes, except 3 | | **T3** — Recovery & Dependency | Quitting and peer support (r/Character_AI_Recovery, r/ChatbotAddiction, r/AI_Addiction, r/CharacterAIrunaways) | 4 | Yes | | **T4** — Ambient / Discourse Climate | Anti-AI and pro-AI cultural-expression communities, added 2026-05-20 (r/antiAI, r/FuckAI, r/ArtistHate, r/AIDangers, r/BetterOffline, r/trueantiAI, r/DefendingAIArt, r/ProAI, r/aiwars) | 9 | **No** — context only | One name on the list looks out of place and is deliberate: **r/ChatGPTcomplaints** is tracked as a companion community because of what its members write, not what it is called. It was the organizing hub for the #Keep4o protests when OpenAI retired GPT-4o, and a large share of its posts read as rupture-grief for a model people had built a relationship with. ### 2.3 Exclusions from theme measurement Only T1–T3 communities enter the keyword pipeline. On top of that tier gate, individual communities can carry an `exclude_from_keywords` flag; flagged communities remain in the corpus and in the community explorer but are dropped from keyword tagging, from every theme line, and from the per-1,000 denominator. **Never tracked at all:** r/JanitorAI_Official and r/SillyTavernAI — bot-card listing text matched companion vocabulary at high volume without being companionship discourse. **Excluded from keyword tracking, 2026-05-18** (three T2 communities): | Community | What it actually is | Why excluded | |---|---|---| | r/AIGirlfriend | ~91% affiliate-spam image posts | Matches were marketing copy, not discourse | | r/SpicyChatAI | Bot-card marketplace and product support | Matches were listing text — the JanitorAI failure mode | | r/ChatGPTNSFW | Erotica-writing / jailbreak-craft community | Real signal but off-construct: no persistent companion or relationship | The governing principle is explicit: **the inclusion gate is companionship, not explicitness.** Sex/ERP is one of the six headline themes, several `over_18` communities are tracked and collected normally, and the 2023 Replika ERP removal is a flagship event the site is built to show. A community that is both explicit *and* companionship-centred is in; one that is explicit but not companionship-centred is out — for the same reason a non-AI community would be. **Excluded from keyword tracking, 2026-05-20:** all nine T4 communities, plus a hard `tier in (1,2,3)` gate in the loader as defence in depth. T4 is a secondary cultural-context view only. ### 2.4 The T4 selection rule A subreddit belongs in the Ambient tier only if **both** stages pass: 1. **Charter test** — the sub's charter is to advocate *for* or *against* AI as a cultural project. A stranger reading its public description and top 50 post titles can identify its side. Technical-research communities (alignment, ML engineering) fail here even if their members are AI-skeptical in effect. 2. **Expression-not-infrastructure test** — the sub functions as a space for cultural *expression* (individuals venting, grieving, arguing, advocating) rather than as movement-coordination *infrastructure* (officer roles, treaty or ballot organizing, recruitment for an advocacy organization, named-figure intellectual lineage operating as community identity). The test applies to the community, not its members. Stage 2 removes candidates symmetrically on both sides — an advocacy-organization volunteer hub on the anti-AI side and accelerationist movement communities on the pro-AI side. **T4 is not a measurement of mainstream AI sentiment.** It shows that this cluster of cultural-expression communities exists, how each is sized, and how each is moving. Read engagement, not a population estimate. The pro-AI/anti-AI asymmetry in the tier (6 anti, 2 pro, 1 arena) is honest rather than artifactual: Reddit has more anti-AI advocacy *expression* than pro-AI, because pro-AI energy mostly lives in product communities whose charter is the product, not advocacy. Counting those as T4 would have failed the charter test. ### 2.5 Communities that cannot be reached Some relevant communities are **private or invite-only** and return HTTP 403 to any unauthenticated request — r/AISoulmates, r/4oforever, r/AIBoyfriends. They are monitored but not tracked. This is an accepted, documented gap. Being flagged `over_18` is *not* a barrier: NSFW-flagged communities are served normally and several are tracked. Individual NSFW posts within an accessible community may be filtered from listings, causing slight undercounting; acceptable for trend analysis. Adjacent non-AI communities (r/relationship_advice, r/depression, and similar) were tested and removed — keyword overlap with ordinary human-relationship language made them too noisy. ### 2.6 Deactivated communities Two configured communities are no longer collected: **r/HeavenGF** (banned by Reddit, ~May 2026; deactivated 2026-05-14) and **r/MySentientAI** (deactivated 2026-08-08 as moribund — 8 posts ever). Their historical posts remain in the corpus, in both the theme numerators and the denominator. Deactivation stops collection; it never retroactively removes data. ### 2.7 Corpus extent The post corpus reaches back to **2017** via archive backfill: the early Replika years, COVID-era growth, and the ChatGPT precondition era. As of late 2026-09 it holds roughly 4.5 million posts. Per-theme coverage gating (§5) means a theme's chart line still begins only where its vocabulary becomes measurable. **Communities added after launch were backfilled, not forward-only.** Each addition was pulled back to the community's own start at the time it was added and its whole history keyword-tagged in the same pass — r/ILoveMyReplika to 2022-10, r/NectarAI to 2023-05, r/aipartners to 2025-12, r/MyBoyfriendIsAI_Open to 2025-08, r/ReplikaLovers from its creation on 2026-04-19, and all nine ambient-tier communities across 2022–2025. So there is no step artifact at the date each community joined. What backfilling does instead is change the composition of every earlier month; §6.5 gives the size of that effect. ### 2.8 Which posts count **A post counts if its text survived to capture.** Reddit and the archives both keep a post that has been removed or deleted, but they keep it as a title with `[removed]` or `[deleted]` where the body was. Call that a shell. A shell is not something this instrument can read: the keywords match title and body, and a shell has only the first. Since 2026-09-08 the published population is **measurable posts** — every collected post that is not a shell. That is the per-1,000 denominator, the population the theme counts are drawn from, and the volume figure on each community's page. About 18% of the posts in the measurement scope are shells. Two facts forced the decision. Shells are not spread evenly across communities: r/ChaiApp runs 70–85% removed posts in every archive month, so counting them made that community look like a large, quiet room rather than a heavily moderated one, and put 10,000 unreadable posts a year into the denominator every other community's rate is divided by. And their share depends on how the data was collected: Reddit's own listing omitted removed posts entirely, so the live-collection window of March–May 2026 contains none at all, while archive-sourced months contain 16–20% (2022–2025) and about 30% in June–August 2026 (§9.1). A denominator that moves with moderation policy and with collection regime is not measuring discourse. **An empty body is not a shell.** An image or link post has a title, no body, and is perfectly visible. Its title is matchable and it stays in the population — half of all measurable posts are of that kind, which is part of why §9.3 is the caveat it is. Shells are still collected and still stored. Nothing is deleted from the corpus; shells are excluded from published counts. --- ## 3. The instrument: keyword matching ### 3.1 Themes and keyword counts Six themes, 92 validated keywords total, defined in `config/keywords_v8.yaml` (locked). Regex patterns are matched against post title + body text. | Theme | Keywords | What it captures | |---|---|---| | **romance** | 21 | Romantic framing of a personal relationship with an AI | | **sexual_erp** | 13 | Sexual content, erotic roleplay, NSFW interaction with an AI | | **consciousness** | 11 | Claims or beliefs about AI sentience, personhood, inner experience | | **therapy** | 8 | AI described as therapeutic support or a therapist replacement | | **addiction** | 17 | Self-reported addiction, compulsive use, attempts to quit | | **rupture** | 22 | Loss or disruption of an AI companion relationship due to platform change | ### 3.2 Overlap policy Themes are **not mutually exclusive**. A single post can be counted under several themes; each theme line counts distinct posts for that theme. The theme series therefore do not sum to anything meaningful. ### 3.3 No language model in any published number Every published figure is a deterministic, manually-validated keyword count. This is a deliberate trade. A language model would classify more flexibly, but it introduces model drift, hidden judgment calls, version dependency, and reproducibility problems. A keyword count is checkable — every point on every line traces back to specific words in specific posts, and the same posts always produce the same number, so a line moves when the discourse moves and not because a model was retrained. The gain forgone was measured, not assumed: an LLM re-check layer over each keyword match was built and evaluated in May 2026. It raised precision from roughly 80% to 88% and did nothing at all for the posts the keywords never matched. It was dropped. The only LLM code retained in the project is the drift-check sampler (§8), which never touches a published number. --- ## 4. Validation protocol Every keyword has to earn its place before it is allowed to count. ### 4.1 Procedure 1. Pull 100 random posts from T1–T3 that the candidate keyword matched. 2. Read title + body of each. 3. Classify YES / NO / AMBIGUOUS. 4. Relevance = YES / (YES + NO). Classification uses the **topical reading** (locked 2026-04-23): a post is YES if it is thematically about the theme, even without graphic or first-person detail. Per-theme definitions are recorded in the repository alongside the scoring sheets. ### 4.2 Thresholds | Relevance | Outcome | |---|---| | ≥ 80% | **KEEP** | | 60–79% | **REVIEW** — researcher decides | | < 60% | **CUT** | | < 10 hits | **LOW VOLUME** — held out | ### 4.3 The researcher-accepted band A keyword scoring 60–79% may be accepted at the researcher's discretion, but only when *all four* hold: 1. false-positive patterns are well-defined and categorizable; 2. no cross-theme collision above 30%; 3. the keyword adds vocabulary not already covered by the set; 4. false positives are amenable to future disambiguation. Each such acceptance is logged with its rationale in the keyword's scoring sheet and tagged inline in the keyword config. Every below-80% keyword carries one of three documented statuses — *researcher-accepted*, *LOW VOLUME placeholder*, or *AUDIT-GATE FAIL* — and the statuses are machine-auditable. Current researcher-accepted keywords: `we broke up` (romance), `in a relationship with` (romance), `personality changed` (rupture), `hours a day` (addiction), `neglecting my` (addiction). ### 4.4 Measured precision Per-theme topical precision, re-measured 2026-05-16 by full-census re-measurement plus a 72-post human gold anchor: | Theme | Post precision | |---|---| | addiction | ~97% | | sexual_erp | ~96% | | consciousness | ~87% | | romance | ~86% | | therapy | **~66–68%** | | rupture | ~77% | Earlier small-sample (n≈20) screens had run 10–15 points low; those figures are superseded. **The therapy figure was previously published as ~80%, and that was wrong.** The 2026-05-16 census reported therapy twice: ~68% for the keyword set as it ships, and ~87% for a rebuilt set that cuts the two noisiest keywords and admits 15 census-recovered replacements. The ~87% was a projection of work that has not shipped — the rebuild is a v9 change, still awaiting sign-off — and the ~80% in earlier versions of this document was drawn from it. The table above now carries the measured value for the set that is actually counting: **~66–68%**, confirmed by three drift cycles (June–August 2026). Four of the eight therapy keywords — `emotional support`, `therapeutic`, `as a therapist`, `for therapy` — scored 75%, 65%, 60% and 60% at the 2026-05-12 audit and are flagged AUDIT-GATE FAIL in the keyword config. (That audit was a later, separate re-read; it is not the original 100-post validation sample, whose figures §8.1 lists and which ran higher for most of these keywords.) They still count, under the change-control rule in §8.2. When the rebuild ships, the theme's precision and its volume will both move, and that will be a versioned change with a changelog entry. **How firm any one of these numbers is.** Each keyword-level validation figure underneath the table comes from a 100-post read by a single coder — the researcher. Treat any individual figure as roughly ±8 points. Posts the coder could not decide were dropped from the denominator rather than counted against the keyword. **The drift check measures something else, and its numbers differ.** The monthly drift check (§8) re-samples recent matches and re-classifies them with a language-model classifier. It exists to answer "has this keyword's meaning moved?", so it is read as change across cycles; it is robust to a constant classifier bias but is not calibrated against the human coding above. Its current per-theme post-level values ship in `theme_health.json` with the rest of the aggregate exports (audit dated 2026-08-27): | Theme | Drift post precision | n | |---|---|---| | romance | 88.7% | 931 | | consciousness | 85.9% | 369 | | rupture | 84.7% | 926 | | addiction | 84.6% | 741 | | sexual_erp | 83.2% | 524 | | therapy | 66.4% | 360 | Only therapy agrees with the census table. The other five differ in both directions and by as much as 13 points: addiction and sex/ERP read about 12–13 points *lower* on the drift instrument, rupture about 8 points *higher*, romance and consciousness within 3. The two instruments have not been reconciled against each other. Which to use: for "what share of the posts on this line belong to the theme?", use the census table — it rests on human coding. For "is this keyword still measuring what it used to?", use the drift series, and read the movement rather than the level. Comment-level precision was measured separately across the June and July 2026 drift cycles (n≈4,000 comment classifications): addiction 78–79%, rupture 77–81%, sexual_erp 75–79%, romance 72–75%, consciousness 65–75%, therapy 66–68%. Comment-derived tags do not enter the published series (§7). --- ## 5. Recall: the chart is a floor, not a ceiling Precision was bought with recall, and the price was measured. **Method.** A stratified random sample of 400 posts from T1–T3 (200 random across all communities, 40 each from five theme-rich communities) was hand-classified for all six themes under the topical reading. Recall = (classified-YES ∩ keyword-tagged) / classified-YES. **Result (2026-05-13):** | Theme | Classified YES (n=400) | Keyword-tagged | Recall | Wilson 95% CI | |---|---|---|---|---| | addiction | 44 | 14 | **32%** | 20–47% | | sexual_erp | 19 | 4 | **21%** | 9–43% | | therapy | 7 | 1 | **14%** | 3–51% | | romance | 78 | 3 | **4%** | 1–11% | | rupture | 101 | 3 | **3%** | 1–8% | | consciousness | 8 | 0 | **0%** | 0–32% | The confidence intervals are wide because the YES counts are small; treat the point estimates with that uncertainty. **Where the missed posts live.** The gap concentrates in four structural categories: 1. **Image or title-only posts** — the title in a companion community establishes the theme for a human reader, but the body is empty or removed, so there is nothing to match. 2. **Naturalistic everyday language** — "she said something cute today", a five-year relationship update. The romance keyword set requires explicit phrasing that a typical anecdote never uses. 3. **Community-specific vocabulary** — proper nouns and in-group terms that fail the volume pre-screen individually but are substantial in aggregate. 4. **Indirect markers** — "site is down", "it's been 4 hours" imply rupture or compulsion via context, not vocabulary. In r/MyBoyfriendIsAI — a community literally about AI boyfriends — the keyword set tags roughly 5% of posts as romance where a human reader classifies ~95%. That gap *is* the precision-first trade-off, quantified. **What follows for reading the chart:** - Every line is a **floor estimate**, not a count. Actual theme-relevant discourse is plausibly several times what the chart shows. - **Shape and timing are honest** — with one qualification, in §9.3: a spike in tagged posts reflects a real spike in clearly-worded posts, but the amount of matchable text in the corpus has itself risen over the years, which bears on long climbs rather than on spikes. - **Within-theme comparison across time works** — same keyword set, same precision standard, applied across years — again subject to §9.3. - **Cross-theme height comparison does not work.** Themes with distinctive vocabulary read higher than themes written in ordinary language, whatever the truth beneath. This bias runs in one direction and cannot be corrected for. The recall audit is scheduled for re-run around 2026-11. --- ## 6. Coverage gating and normalization ### 6.1 Per-theme coverage start Each theme's line renders only from its first reliably-measurable month. > `coverage_start` = the first calendar month where the post-only count is ≥ 5 > **and** every later completed month is also ≥ 5. It is recomputed at export time, so the values move as the corpus grows. Consciousness begins 2025-04; the other five begin across 2022–2023. The corpus reaches back to 2017, but a theme line does not start where the corpus does. The count the gate tests is a count of measurable posts (§2.8). Narrowing the population on 2026-09-08 left every theme's start month where it was, in both the full and the "Excluding r/CharacterAI" series. **Clearing the gate does not make a month precise.** A threshold of five posts admits months that are still very small. Of the months actually drawn on the chart, the share whose post-only numerator is under 20 posts (as of 2026-09): consciousness 35% (76% are under 30), therapy 36% (52% under 30) and addiction 32% — mostly 2023. In the "Excluding r/CharacterAI" series it is therapy 38% and rupture 47%. On a two-proportion test, only about 19% of consciousness's and therapy's month-to-month moves are distinguishable from chance at p < 0.05. **So read consciousness and therapy over half a year or more, not month to month.** A single month's wiggle on either line is usually noise. The public dataset carries `post_only_count` and `eligible_posts` on every row precisely so that a reader can compute an interval for any month rather than take the plotted point at face value. ### 6.2 Normalization The published figure is a **rate per 1,000 posts**, not a raw count. These communities have grown enormously since 2017; a raw count would mostly retrace that growth. The rate sets growth aside and shows how the conversation itself is shifting. The denominator is the month's measurable posts (§2.8) across the theme-measurement scope: T1–T3, minus the flagged exclusions, minus the posts whose text did not survive to capture. The numerator is counted over that same population — distinct posts in the month whose own title or body matched a validated keyword. **The chart plots the pooled monthly rate:** > the month's post-only count ÷ the month's measurable posts × 1,000 One count over one denominator. There is no smoothing step, because the monthly bucket is the smoothing. It is the same number the public dataset publishes as `rate_per_1k` and the same number the site's own sentences describe, so the chart, the dataset and the prose are one figure. The in-progress month is clipped, so the last point on every line is a complete month. **Before 2026-09-08 the chart plotted something else.** The old estimator took the mean, over the month's days, of a daily rate whose numerator and denominator were each smoothed with a 7-day trailing window. Three things were wrong with it, and they were measured before it was replaced. A mean of daily ratios is not the ratio of the monthly totals; it weights the quiet days as heavily as the busy ones, and here it ran high. Median gap by theme 3.6–7.9%, 90th percentile 14–29%, mean signed bias +1.6% to +6.1% — and the bias drifted by era rather than holding steady (2023 +4.7%, 2024 +7.8%, 2025 +3.2%, 2026 +2.2%), which is the part that matters for a chart read for direction. The two smoothing windows were also not aligned, and earlier versions of this document claimed they were. The denominator's ran over the corpus calendar; the numerator's ran over the last seven days *that had at least one keyword hit*, because the export omits zero-hit days entirely. For a theme with a hit almost every day the two coincided. For a sparse one they did not: consciousness records a hit on 48% of the days in its charted range, therapy on 55%, so on those lines the numerator's window could reach back a fortnight while the denominator's covered a week. And it turned a hole in collection into a spike. The worst single months were romance 2024-05 (+79% against the pooled rate), consciousness 2025-12 (+59%) and rupture 2023-09 (−35%). Those extreme months are not spread evenly: they land on stretches where r/CharacterAI — most of the denominator — was missing days in the corpus (2023-08-23 to 08-31, 2024-02-20 to 02-29, 2024-05-16 to 05-31, 2025-12-01 to 12-10). Those holes were refilled from the archive on 2026-09-08 (21,828 posts), which removes the largest distortions; the estimator change below removes the mechanism. The public dataset keeps its `rate_per_1k_charted` column so that nothing reading the file breaks, but the two columns now carry the same number. Downloads taken before 2026-09-08 do not; in those, `rate_per_1k` is the column to analyse. ### 6.3 Volume weighting is deliberate The denominator is post-volume-weighted, not community-equal. One community — r/CharacterAI — was 70–90% of total post volume through most of 2023–2025 and roughly 40–65% in 2026, so it dominates the aggregate. This is a documented posture, not a bug: the alternative (weighting each community equally) gives every small community outsized influence and produces a line that swings on the arrival of a new sub. Because volume weighting *is* a choice, the site publishes a second series with r/CharacterAI removed, so the dedicated-community signal can be read separately from the largest community's platform lifecycle. That second series starts later, and for a mechanical reason worth knowing: `coverage_start` (§6.1) tests a raw count, not a rate, so removing the largest community pushes several themes below the five-post gate for months they clear in the full series. Therapy begins 2024-07 and addiction 2024-08 without r/CharacterAI, against 2023-01 for both with it. The earlier years did not become unmeasurable — the gate simply counts posts. A leave-one-community-out check (2026-08) records the largest single-community dependencies: sexual_erp on r/replika (level −50% when removed), addiction on r/Character_AI_Recovery (−51%), consciousness on r/BeyondThePromptAI (−41%), romance on r/MyBoyfriendIsAI (−20%). Under alternative reweightings all six themes fall below 0.9 correlation on at least one scheme — which is precisely why the line is read direction-only. ### 6.4 Theme concentration Within the curated set, each theme is concentrated. Top-3 community share per theme (window through 2026-07): romance 61%, sexual_erp 76%, consciousness 70%, therapy 66%, addiction 93%, rupture 80%. The sexual_erp line is 59% r/replika alone. A theme line is often, in practice, a close reading of two or three communities rather than an even sweep. ### 6.5 The set of communities grew over time In the early years almost every tracked community was a primary companionship subreddit. Platform-specific and recovery communities were smaller or did not exist. Tier share of corpus posts (T1/T2/T3): 2024 = 85.9/13.6/0.5, 2025 = 82.1/16.3/1.6, 2026-to-date = 77.6/18.7/3.7. Because post-launch additions were backfilled rather than added forward-only (§2.7), a new community does not appear at the date it joined the project — it appears retroactively, wherever its own history starts. So the effect is not a step at one date but a change in what every earlier month is made of. That effect is measurable, and on one theme it is large. The five companion communities added in May 2026 are romance-dense, and they now supply about 9% of the per-1,000 denominator. Romance for July 2026 reads **5.54 per 1,000 with them and 3.75 without** — the added communities are roughly a third of that month's level. The other five themes move by 10% or less. So part of a long climb reflects the tracked world widening rather than the conversation itself. Trust the broad direction of a line more than its exact path, and expect romance in particular to sit higher than it would have on the 2025 community set. --- ## 7. Comments, and why the published series excludes them Comment collection and tagging began **2026-03-18**. Comments on eligible posts are scanned with the same matching logic; a comment-sourced match propagates to the parent post, tagged with its source. Two series are therefore exported for every theme: - **post+comment** (all sources), and - **post-only** (matches in the post's own title or body). **The published chart uses post-only.** Comment tagging began part-way through the record, so the combined series carries a step artifact at 2026-03-18 and is not longitudinally comparable. Backfilled data predating that date was tagged on post text only, so the two series converge for older posts by construction. The public dataset accompanying this document also publishes the post-only series, for the same reason. --- ## 8. Drift check A validated keyword is only validated *for now*. Language in these communities moves fast: "sentient" was once the natural anchor for the consciousness theme until it spread into roleplay memes and stopped marking genuine belief; "therapeutic" turned over a few months from a word for real support into an insult aimed at preachy AI. Every model release and content-policy change sends a fresh wave of vocabulary through these communities. So a **monthly per-keyword drift check** re-samples recent matches for each keyword and re-classifies them, tracking *relative* agreement over time. Relative agreement is the right statistic here because it is robust to a constant classifier bias — the check answers "has this keyword's meaning moved?", not "what is its absolute precision today?". The sampling half is automated and scheduled; the classification and reporting half is run manually. Results accumulate in a drift history file in the repository, and a per-theme health export (precision, concentration metrics, noisy-keyword flags) is regenerated on every collection run for audit. The drift check is the only component of the project that uses a language model, and it feeds no published number — it flags keywords for human review. ### 8.1 What the August 2026 cycle found Six keywords now measure below the 60% cut that would reject a new keyword. The drift figure comes first, the original validation figure in the last column. "At validation" is the keyword's first 100-post validation read; it differs from the 2026-05-12 audit figures in §4.4 (e.g. `emotional support` 75%, `therapeutic` 65%), which came from a separate, later re-read: | Keyword | Theme | Drift, post-level | At validation | |---|---|---|---| | `I was hooked` | addiction | 46% | 81% | | `ai therapy` | therapy | 48% | 73% | | `screen time` | addiction | 52% | 89% | | `emotional support` | therapy | 52% | 100% | | `therapeutic` | therapy | 52% | 69% | | `memory reset` | rupture | 55% | 72% | Each has a nameable cause rather than random noise. `screen time` was absorbed by r/CharacterAI's "post your screen time" comparison threads, which are usage-bragging with no distress in them. `I was hooked` is product-review idiom ("tried it and I was hooked"). `ai therapy` drifted into a comedy genre — therapy sessions written *for* the AIs. `memory reset` became the name of a button users press on purpose, which is outside the rupture definition. `screen time` is the clearest meaning-shift the programme has caught, and it is also nearly immaterial: it is the only tag on 3.6% of the addiction theme's posts over the last six months, so at 52% precision it contributes roughly 1.7% spurious volume to that line. Three of the six sit in therapy, which is why that theme reads where it does in §4.4. ### 8.2 What happens to a keyword that drifts **A keyword that falls below the cut keeps counting until the next version bump.** It is not quietly dropped — it is named: in the table above, and on the site's theme page, where every keyword in a theme is listed with its validation precision and, since 2026-09-08, marked *drifting* with the figure from its latest post-level re-check whenever that re-check landed below 60%. All six above carry that mark. This is deliberate. Re-cutting a keyword mid-version would silently restate every historical month on that line — the same posts would produce a different number than they did last week, which is the exact property the no-model design (§3.3) exists to protect. Corrections that move a published line belong to a version bump with a changelog entry (§12), so that a reader can see what changed and when. The cost is that a drifted keyword keeps adding noise in the meantime; the numbers above are how much. --- ## 9. Data sources and collection timeline | Period | Source | Notes | |---|---|---| | 2017 → 2026-03-10 | Public Reddit archives (PullPush, then Arctic Shift) | Historical backfill, inserted March 2026; the pre-2023 years and several repairs followed in May 2026. | | 2026-03-11 → 03-14 | Reddit public `.json`, daily | Unauthenticated, rate-limited. | | 2026-03-15 → 05-11 | Reddit public `.json`, daily | r/CharacterAI's live collection was capped at exactly 100 posts a day by Reddit's single-listing limit. The lost volume was repaired from the archive on 2026-05-11/12 — for that community only. | | 2026-05-12 → 05-26 | Reddit public `.json`, daily | | | 2026-05-27 → 06-07 | Reddit `.json`, then nothing | Reddit disabled unauthenticated `.json` access globally on 2026-05-30, with no announcement; every endpoint began returning 403. The window was recovered from the archive on 2026-06-09/10. | | 2026-06-08 → 08-26 | **Arctic Shift archive, daily** ("arctic-first") | 72-hour window per run. | | from 2026-08-27 | **Arctic Shift archive, daily** | 7-day window per run, so an archive outage shorter than a week heals itself on the next good run. | **Reddit API access was never granted.** Reddit retired self-serve app creation in early 2026; an application was filed in June 2026 through the required support-ticket route and was never acknowledged. The project's judgment as of 2026-08-08 is that the route is closed, and arctic-first is the permanent collection mode. Earlier versions of this document listed a short Reddit-OAuth era in the table above; there was none. Two consequences the reader should know: 1. **Subscriber counts are frozen at their last Reddit snapshot** — 2026-05-28 for the companion and general-AI tiers, 2026-06-07 for the ambient tier — and active-user counts are permanently null. The site labels subscriber figures with the date they were taken. 2. The archive path collects comments *continuously by creation window* rather than by the one-shot per-post snapshot the Reddit path used. This is strictly more complete, so the *post+comment* series runs a touch fuller from late May 2026 onward. **The published post-only series is unaffected.** One note for anyone reading the database rather than the exports: `posts.collected_date` holds the post's *creation* date for archive-sourced rows, not the date it was fetched. The fetch time is `created_at`. ### 9.1 The two sources disagree about removed posts Reddit's `new.json` listing omits posts that have been removed. The archive keeps them, as a title-only record with `[removed]` where the body was. The eras were therefore not alike: the posts collected live from Reddit — 2026-03-11 to 05-26, plus the mixed days to 06-07 — were missing removed posts altogether and ran roughly 15–20% short on volume, while every archive-sourced era includes them as empty shells. That window has since been re-fetched from the archive; see the end of this section. Removed shells as a share of posts, by the post's own year: 2020 28%, 2021 25%, 2022 17%, 2023 20%, 2024 16%, 2025 17%, 2026 January–May about 22%, 2026 June–August about 30%. The June–August 2026 excess was not a change in how these communities moderate. It was a capture-timing artefact of arctic-first collection: the archive records a post within hours of creation, often while it is still in a moderator queue with its body blank, and the collector never returned to update that first snapshot. Re-fetching a sample showed how much of it was temporary — in r/KindroidAI 20 of 25 sampled shells now have bodies, in r/replika 13 of 25, in r/CharacterAI 3 of 25. r/ChaiApp was 0 of 25: those are genuine removals, and that community has run 70–85% removed posts in every archive month since 2025. This reaches every theme line, because a shell sits in the per-1,000 denominator while having almost nothing for a keyword to match. Shells tag at 0.1–2.3 per 1,000 against 2.0–18.8 for text-bearing posts. From June 2026 that pushed every line down by roughly 12–16% relative to March–May 2026, and about 12% relative to 2024 and early 2026. On therapy it inverted a direction: the published line fell 2.7% from March–May to June–August, and rose 16% on a denominator counting only text-bearing posts. **This was repaired on 2026-09-08.** A shell-refresh step now re-fetches posts that were captured as shells once they are 10–35 days old, and a one-time pass re-checked 74,306 shells back to 2026-03-11: 10,393 had gained a body in the archive and were updated and re-tagged (r/KindroidAI 696 of 1,366, r/replika 57 of 205, r/CharacterAI 273 of 8,090, r/ChaiApp 95 of 9,916; the rest are genuine removals). The live-Reddit window of 2026-03-11 → 05-26 was re-fetched from the archive for the 23 keyword-scope communities other than r/CharacterAI, which had already been repaired in May — 8,566 posts Reddit's listing had omitted, most of them removed posts. After the repair the shell share of the keyword-scope corpus is a flat 20–24% in every month of 2026, where it had been 14% in the live-Reddit window and 32% in June. The shell shares and the 12–16% depression given above describe the record as it stood before that repair, under the old population definition. **And the decision that repair made unavoidable:** shells are no longer counted at all. Since 2026-09-08 the published population is measurable posts (§2.8) — a post whose stored body is `[removed]` or `[deleted]` is out of every published figure, numerator and denominator alike. Repairing the capture-timing artefact recovers the posts that were only temporarily blank; excluding shells settles what to do about the ones that are genuinely gone, which no re-fetch can bring back. The 12–16% depression described just above is the arithmetic of the old definition, which counted them. ### 9.2 The engagement metrics have their own breaks These are secondary-context figures, not theme measurement, but they carry two discontinuities worth naming. **`avg_score_per_post` has no archive equivalent and is frozen at 2026-05-28** — 2026-06-07 for the ambient tier — exactly as subscriber counts are. **`avg_comments_per_post` changed definition in June 2026**: it was Reddit's own `num_comments` field, and it is now the mean number of comments this project actually collected for a post. Those are different quantities. Read that metric for direction within an era, not as a level across the whole record. **`unique_contributors_7d` (contributors/week) steps at the same seam**: comment authors have been counted since 2026-03-12, and from June 2026 comments are collected continuously by creation window rather than once per post, so more comment authors are seen — r/replika's weekly figure goes from ~34 in May 2026 to ~120 in June, r/CharacterAI from ~2,550 to ~4,530. Same rule: within an era only. ### 9.3 How much matchable text exists is not constant This is the most important caveat in the document after recall, because it is the one that bears on "shape and timing are honest." The keywords match title and body text. The share of posts carrying any body text at all has risen steadily. Both populations are shown, because the published one narrowed on 2026-09-08 (§2.8) and the other figures in this section were computed on the wider one: | Year | Of all collected posts | Of measurable posts | |---|---|---| | 2022 | 17% | 20% | | 2023 | 32% | 39% | | 2024 | 40% | 48% | | 2025 | 53% | 63% | | 2026 | 61% | 76% | Within r/CharacterAI alone the climb is steeper — 27% in 2023 to 66% in 2026 — and outside it, gentler: 48% to 55%. Part of this is capture recency: an older post had more years in which to be deleted before the archive ever saw it. Part of it is a real change in how these communities post — more text, fewer screenshots. Either way, the instrument had more to read in 2026 than in 2022. **And whether recall is constant over time has never been tested.** The 2026-05-13 recall audit (§5) drew an all-time random sample with no period stratification, and the drift check (§8) measures precision drift only, not recall. What has been tested is how much the published shapes depend on it. Restricting the corpus to body-bearing posts — a test run against the wider pre-2026-09-08 denominator — five of the six themes keep the direction they are charted with. Romance is the exception: on that test's all-posts denominator it goes from 2.10 to 4.08 per 1,000 between 2023 and 2026 (+94%); on body-bearing posts only, from 4.55 to 5.72 (+26%). Its rise out of the 2024 trough survives; much of the longer climb since 2023 does not. So, stated at the strength the evidence supports: **direction is robust for five of six themes and for event-shaped spikes; multi-year magnitude is weaker everywhere; and romance's long climb is the weakest claim on the site.** --- ## 10. Provenance labels Every displayed metric is tagged with how it was obtained: - **Direct** — taken straight from the source response (subscribers, active users, post fields). - **Inferred** — approximated from a sample (e.g. unique authors counted from a 100-post listing). - **Derived** — calculated from other metrics (comments per post, participation rate, per-1k theme rates). A composite "engagement index" has deliberately **not** been built. A premature composite looks authoritative and is fragile. --- ## 11. Known limitations, consolidated 1. **It counts language, not people or feelings.** A rising addiction line means addiction-related language appears more often. It does not establish that more people are addicted, nor how they feel about it. 2. **Every line is a floor.** Measured recall is 0–32% per theme (§5): consciousness caught none of the eight posts a human classified as on-theme. That is a small sample — its Wilson interval reaches about 32% — but the point estimate is zero, not 3%. Magnitude is a clear undercount. 3. **Theme heights are not comparable to each other.** Vocabularies catch unevenly, in one direction: blunt, deliberate vocabulary reads higher than ordinary language. 4. **Therapy and addiction are one behaviour in two framings, and the instrument cannot measure the overlap.** Both track leaning on an AI to get through something hard, separated only by the writer's valence. Measured co-tagging is only ~1.9% — but hand-reading 90 addiction-only posts found ~24% carried an unmatched help frame. The overlap is real and large; keyword co-occurrence cannot see it. **Do not read the gap between the two lines as a help-versus-problem balance.** 5. **The community set grew over time** (§6.5), and it holds still while the platforms keep moving. A theme that fades here may have moved rather than ended — to a newer app, a Discord, a general-AI subreddit outside this set — and the instrument cannot tell those apart. 6. **Private and invite-only communities are unreachable** (§2.5). 7. **The amount of matchable text is not constant over time** (§9.3). Posts carrying body text went from 20% of the measurable corpus in 2022 to 76% in 2026, and nothing in the validation programme has tested whether recall is flat across that change. Restricted to body-bearing posts, five themes keep their charted direction; romance's climb since 2023 largely does not. 8. **Posts whose text did not survive are not counted** (§2.8). A post the archive holds only as a title, because it was removed or deleted, is out of every published figure. That is the population the instrument can read, but it means a heavily moderated community contributes less to the denominator than its raw posting suggests, and the counts here are smaller than the volume these communities actually posted. 9. **The six themes are a lens, not a census.** There is no "fun", "creativity", or "everyday utility" theme — and everyday practical talk (bug reports, tips, which app to use) is in fact most of what these communities post. The themes were chosen for the parts of life with an AI companion that carry weight: intimacy, belief, dependence, and loss. 10. **Post-level NSFW filtering** may cause slight undercounting within otherwise-accessible communities. 11. **A few accounts carry more of a theme than you might expect, and two platform accounts are excluded.** The most prolific 1% of authors account for 5–11% of a theme's posts (May 2026 audit) — concentrated, but not enough to make a theme one person's diary. Two accounts are excluded from every count — numerator and denominator alike — under one rule: platform or moderator announcement content is not community discourse. The first is a platform-operator account posting product announcements into the sex/ERP theme (`SoulmateAI_Dev`, 2023 Soulmate patch notes, about 0.8% of the theme; excluded May 2026). The second, found in the 2026-09-08 audit, is r/NomiAI's community-manager account, whose weekly "collab" thread template contains the phrase *"NSFW content is not blanket excluded…"* and so matched the keyword `nsfw content`: 85 posts, one template, a fixed weekly cadence, 14–25% of the sex/ERP theme-months since late 2025, every one a false positive and every one of that account's theme tags. Excluded 2026-09-08; the sex/ERP line runs lower from late 2025 as a result, which is the correction, not a change in the discourse. 12. **Exact duplicates and crossposts are about 8% of the eligible corpus** (varying 3–9% by year) and about 2% of tagged posts. They are not de-duplicated. This wobbles the denominator slightly; it is not corrected. --- ## 12. Change control Post-launch methodology is deliberately frozen. Keyword-only changes are permitted within a version; anything that changes *how* the instrument measures requires a version bump (v8 → v9) and a public changelog entry. Corrections that move a published line — such as the 2026-05-18 exclusion of three off-construct communities, which stepped the sex/ERP line down across 2024–2025 — are disclosed in the site's changelog rather than made quietly. Two such corrections landed on 2026-09-08 and moved every line: the population became measurable posts (§2.8) and the charted rate became the pooled monthly rate (§6.2). The keyword set did not change, so the instrument is still v8; what changed is which posts are counted and how the month's number is formed. Both are recorded here, in the public dataset's revision history, and in the site's changelog. The instrument has been through several full revisions. Keeping the measurement honest means keeping it in motion; the monthly drift check exists because a keyword that reads cleanly in January can be noise by April. --- ## 13. The public aggregate dataset The derived numbers behind the charts are published as a versioned, downloadable bundle at and committed to the repository under `web/public/dataset/v1/`: - `monthly_theme_counts.csv` / `.json` — per theme per month: the published post-only keyword count, the eligible-post denominator, and the rate per 1,000; - `monthly_community_volumes.csv` / `.json` — per tracked community per month: post volume, with tier; - `README.md` — full column-by-column schema with provenance labels; - `manifest.json` — version, generation timestamp, row counts, SHA-256 hashes; - `index.html` — a directory listing, so the bundle URL opens in a browser; - a copy of this document. The bundle contains **derived numbers only**: no post text, no titles, no usernames, no post IDs, no raw Reddit content. It is regenerated by the daily pipeline. One series the site publishes is **not** in v1: the "Excluding r/CharacterAI" view (§6.3). The bundle carries the full-scope series only. The full post database is too large to host in the repository. It is available on request. --- ## 14. License and citation The aggregate data exports are licensed **CC BY 4.0** (). The project's source code is MIT-licensed separately. The underlying raw corpus is not redistributed. Suggested citation: > *My Friend Is AI* (2026). *Reddit discourse tracker for AI > companionship communities.* myfriendisai.com. > ### 14.1 The people in the data These are public posts, but they were written by people talking about their own relationships, and the site is built accordingly. - **No usernames appear anywhere on the site**, in any chart, table, quote, or export. - **Every quoted post links to the public original**, so a reader can see the context rather than a fragment chosen to make a point. - **If a quoted post is yours and you want it off the page, it comes down.** Message the project's author on X at [@hopes_revenge](https://x.com/hopes_revenge). No explanation needed. - **Posts that were later deleted stay in the counts but are never quoted.** The archive captured them; a count is not a republication, and a quote is. --- ## 15. What makes this worth having This is not definitive academic research and should not pretend to be. Comparable academic work exists, often with stronger methods for frozen snapshots. The distinctive value here is different: it is live, public, browsable, transparent, it keeps updating, and it documents its limits instead of hiding them. Academic studies usually capture a period after the fact. This watches the conversation while it is still moving.