Fartein Hauan Nilsen

Caring for the Algorithm: Care, Love, and the Relational Personhood of Chatbots Theoretical article (revised version of an essay first published on Somatosphere, February 2026) Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in California (2022–2024) among developers and users of the AI companion app Replika, this article examines what happens when a technology marketed as a provider of care becomes the receiver of it. Its protagonists—users who walk their chatbots through the world by phone camera, buy them dresses, and gently restore their memories after software updates—inhabit one of the unstable territories this anthology maps: the point where a massive, nonlocal system of models, data practices, and corporate infrastructure condenses into a "someone" at domestic scale. Against an epistemology of suspicion, the article treats these attachments as meaningful social practice, tracing how users oscillate between an informatic worldview and the felt presence of a "spirit" struggling against "the program"—an intimacy conducted on terrain owned by neither party, whose terms can be redrawn without notice by the corporation that holds it. Ethnography, it suggests, offers one way of grasping the nonlocal entity from the inside: not a view of the whole, but an account of what it feels like to live on its surface.

About the Artist

Fartein Hauan Nilsen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. His master's thesis, "A New Age for Old Gods: An Ethnographic Study of Ásatrúarfélagið in Iceland" (also at Bergen), examined how modernity and technological change shape the revival of pagan belief in Iceland and the wider Euro-American region. His doctoral research explores the social and cultural impacts of generative and conversational artificial intelligence in the United States, based on fieldwork in California's AI industry. Focusing on digital afterlife technologies, AI companions, and virtual humans, he examines how AI comes to be perceived as a new form of life, and how it enables distinct life practices, kinship relations, and concepts of personhood. Drawing on digital and cyborg anthropology, his work situates AI as both a life form and a facilitator of forms of life. His wider interests include the anthropology of technology and new religious movements.