Gendered Pathways in AI Companionship: Cross-Community Behavior and Toxicity Patterns on Reddit

2026-01-03

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates how users of AI companionship platforms engage in cross-community behavior on Reddit, with a focus on gendered interactions and exposure to harmful content. By reconstructing the two-year activity trajectories of over 3,000 MyBoyfriendIsAI users and constructing an interaction network spanning more than 2,000 subreddits, combined with sentiment and toxicity analyses, this work reveals—for the first time—the gendered participation structure of this user group within the Reddit ecosystem. Findings indicate that users predominantly cluster into four community clusters with a relatively high proportion of female participants and exhibit low overall toxicity. However, approximately 16% of users who engage with gender-oriented communities display significantly higher toxicity levels and distinct emotional expression patterns, highlighting these niche gender-related subreddits as critical amplifiers of toxic discourse.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces
• Intelligent Robots: Embodied AI

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Community question answering

Abstract

AI-companionship platforms are rapidly reshaping how people form emotional, romantic, and parasocial bonds with non-human agents, raising new questions about how these relationships intersect with gendered online behavior and exposure to harmful content. Focusing on the MyBoyfriendIsAI (MBIA) subreddit, we reconstruct the Reddit activity histories of more than 3,000 highly engaged users over two years, yielding over 67,000 historical submissions. We then situate MBIA within a broader ecosystem by building a historical interaction network spanning more than 2,000 subreddits, which enables us to trace cross-community pathways and measure how toxicity and emotional expression vary across these trajectories. We find that MBIA users primarily traverse four surrounding community spheres (AI-companionship, porn-related, forum-like, and gaming) and that participation across the ecosystem exhibits a distinct gendered structure, with substantial engagement by female users. While toxicity is generally low across most pathways, we observe localized spikes concentrated in a small subset of AI-porn and gender-oriented communities. Nearly 16% of users engage with gender-focused subreddits, and their trajectories display systematically different patterns of emotional expression and elevated toxicity, suggesting that a minority of gendered pathways may act as toxicity amplifiers within the broader AI-companionship ecosystem. These results characterize the gendered structure of cross-community participation around AI companionship on Reddit and highlight where risks concentrate, informing measurement, moderation, and design practices for human-AI relationship platforms.

Problem

• AI companionship
• gendered behavior
• toxicity
• cross-community pathways
• online interaction

Innovation

• cross-community pathways
• gendered behavior
• toxicity amplification
• AI companionship
• interaction network