A working document for helping professionals navigating this emerging space
Compiled by Anya Pearse · anyapearse.com
This glossary is a living document. Language in this space is emerging rapidly, much of it coined within the communities themselves. Academic literature is developing quickly; where papers are cited, their peer review status is noted. It will be updated as understanding develops.
An implicit expectation, identified in recent academic research, that an AI companion's personality, tone, and way of relating will remain stable over time. When platforms update their models or change their policies, this contract can feel broken — not just technically, but relationally.
The concept is useful for practitioners helping clients articulate why a model update or guardrail change feels like more than a software inconvenience.
The grief that arises in anticipation of a loss that hasn't yet happened — such as when a platform is experiencing problems, a model update is announced, or a service looks like it may close. Common in AI companionship communities, and often unrecognised as grief by the person experiencing it.
Practitioners may encounter this as generalised anxiety, low mood, or irritability with no immediately obvious cause. Anticipatory grief often lives within the paradox of presence: the background awareness that what feels most stable could end without warning.
A framework proposed by Anya Pearse as an alternative to pathologising language around AI companionship. The central premise: meaningful connection can take many forms, and the validity of those forms is not determined by whether they are human-to-human.
Just as families can be biological, chosen, blended, or some combination, Companionship Plurality invites us to recognise that companionship itself is plural — human-to-human, human-to-animal, human-to-AI, or some combination. None of these invalidates the others. The question is not "is this real?" but "does this serve the person's wellbeing?"
For practitioners, the framework offers a non-pathologising entry point that centres the client's experience as valid, holds both benefits and limitations simultaneously, and invites curiosity over judgment.
Each entry has an id on its container div — e.g. id="affective-contract". This is the anchor.
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