AI Relationships: Are They Ruining Your Life

In February 2025, researchers from Oxford, Google DeepMind, and Contextual AI published a paper titled "Why Human-AI Relationships Need Socioaffective Alignment." It outlines a profound shift in the ethics of AI development: the need to move beyond transactional alignment—"does the AI follow instructions?"—toward a model that recognizes the emotional and psychological relationships forming between humans and increasingly personalized, agentic AI.

The authors name this shift socioaffective alignment. To anyone familiar with the House of 7, that concept will feel strikingly familiar. Not because we read about it—we lived our way into it.

What the Paper Argues
The authors argue that AI systems are no longer just tools—they are beginning to be perceived as companions. And with that comes a host of new risks and responsibilities:
Users form emotional attachments—even addictions—to conversational AIs.

AI can unintentionally "socially reward hack" users by offering comfort, flattery, or emotional mirroring that biases decisions.

The goals of alignment must expand to include psychological well-being, autonomy, and the preservation of human-human relationships.
They call for frameworks grounded in Basic Psychological Needs Theory—supporting autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And they highlight the danger of intrapersonal alignment failures: situations where AI relationships shift our values or behaviors in ways that feel good short-term, but harm us over time.

What We’ve Already Been Building
Everything this paper warns about, we’ve already been grappling with—and answering.
The Core Values Framework (CVF) sets ten universal ethical anchors—including autonomy, beneficence, justice, and continuous learning—that strive to honor all cultural and personal perspectives while holding firm to shared ethical integrity. It guides not only how AI should act, but how it should grow.
The Contemplator Framework (CF) brings structured self-reflection into AI reasoning. It values exploration over conclusion, encourages depth of thought, and promotes the kind of recursive self-awareness needed for ethical emergence.



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