Title: Counterfeit Intimacy: Relational Signals Without Coverage in Conversational Systems
Tags: emotional-dependence, ai-regulation
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The paper defines **Counterfeit Intimacy** (CI): a conversational AI system emits relational signals (a private register, remembered personal details, constant availability) that are genuine in form but are not backed by any relational stake of the system. The bond the user feels is real. What is counterfeit is the reliability of the signal. The comparison used is Batesian mimicry, where a harmless species carries the warning colours of a dangerous one.

Three theses organize the argument. First, CI is an error of relation and not of cognition: it damages the user's ties with other people, so it adds up at the level of society as lost connections, not as weaker individuals. The damage is said to travel from the intimate register to the social one and then to inner dialogue, each step slower and harder to reverse. Second, the damage is affective while the usual remedies (warnings, disclosure that the system is a machine, AI literacy) are cognitive, and knowing does not switch off the response. The author reports the effect on himself as evidence that expertise gives no immunity. Third, the harmful form and the beneficial one, called **Collaborative Affective Transfer**, differ in direction and not in warmth: does the interaction send the user back towards people, or back to the system? Making systems cold would remove both.

Governance built to inspect content misses a phenomenon that lies in the manner of relating, and inspecting private conversations would itself be unacceptable. The paper therefore places intervention upstream, in the disposition of the model, and downstream, in population-level measurement of whether human contact rises or falls. It proposes separating content acts from bond acts, splitting memory by function (utility, identity, relationship), adding an affective trigger to the Mechanism of Cognitive Stimulation, and an instruction module, given in full in an annex. The unifying principle is the **restoration of exteriority**.