Paper detail

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

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.