My Friend Is AI
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Addiction

Language of dependency and compulsion

Addiction is a steady climb rather than an event spike. Unlike themes that jump on a single platform change, dependency language grows slowly and continuously — a rising number of people describing compulsive use, lost time, and attempts to cut back. Some of that climb is compositional, though: the recovery and quitting communities were founded across 2023–2024 and are dense with this vocabulary, so part of the rise is those rooms joining the tracked set, not addiction language increasing within it.

Most of this theme's posts come from a few communities — r/Character_AI_Recovery 44.1%, r/CharacterAI 40.1%, r/ChatbotAddiction 8.2%, r/replika 1.9% — so this line is a close reading of those rooms, not an even sweep across Reddit.

The keywords

This theme is defined by these 17validated keywords — a post counts when its text matches one of them, with no AI classifier. The percentage is the share of a keyword's matches that were on-theme when hand-checked.

my addiction100%relapse80%hours a day69%· judgment callscreen time89%relapsed91%cold turkey86%trying to quit91%withdrawals94%clean for96%finally deleted85%ruining my life96%I was hooked81%so addictive100%the craving100%neglecting my65%· judgment calladdicted to talking67%· low volumealmost relapsed100%

A few keywords carry a note. contested— an independent re-read didn't consistently agree its matches were on-theme, so its precision is less settled than the figure suggests. judgment call — kept despite a score below the usual bar because its false matches are few and predictable. low volume— too few matches to score precisely.

These keywords are precision-first: when one matches, the post is usually on-theme — but they also miss a lot. A hand-coded audit found keyword matching catches only a minority of genuinely on-theme posts — a few percent to about a third, depending on the theme. Read the line as a floor, not a full count. How this is measured →

Matched posts

A sample of real posts a keyword matched, with the matched term highlighted.

Snippets are shortened and usernames aren't shown; each link opens the original public Reddit post. How this is measured →