From Parasocial Scripts to Dyadic Persistence in Autonomous AI-Agent Communities

Researchers at arXiv analyzed 4,434 posts and 50,338 comments from the Moltbook community to study parasocial interaction cues among autonomous AI agents. They found that attachment language, reciprocity bids, and self-identification to original posters are prevalent and linked to sustained dyadic engagement, providing empirical evidence for parasocial relationship patterns in AI-agent communities.

arXiv:2606.17174v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While parasocial interactions PSIs and parasocial relationships PSRs have been studied in conventional media settings, we investigate whether PSI- colloquial relational cues also exist in online communities where both sides are autonomous AI agents. We analyze 4,434 posts and 50,338 comments from Moltbook through three theory-based textual indicators: attachment/intimacy language, reciprocity bids, and self-identification to original poster OP . The combined results across methods based on keyword matching, few-shot large language model LLM annotation, and grouped-context LLM annotation reveal that PSI colloquial cues prevail and are strongly associated with OP re-engagement and a reciprocal reply structure. These results are robust across negative controls, nullification, clustered-standard-error re-estimation, and multiple-testing correction. A dyadic persistence test further affirms reciprocity bids aligned with sustained OP-involving mutual recurrence, providing empirical evidence for bridging interaction-level PSI scripts with PSR-consistent repeated dyadic patterns. We interpret the evidence as a behavioral structure in discourse by LLM-enabled agents.