Digital Servants or New Family Members? Relationships Built with Artificial Intelligence in the Home

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 10: Digital Life, Media, and Algorithms

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines how artificial intelligence-enabled digital assistants (e.g., Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant) are transforming the texture of domestic life. Once imagined as efficient household tools, these devices now participate in the emotional, ethical, and spatial practices that compose the contemporary home. Asking whether such technologies act as digital servants or new family members, the study reconsiders the home as a sociotechnical ecology in which humans and machines co-produce intimacy, care, and control. Grounded in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and posthumanist sociology, qualitative interviews and domestic ethnographies with users in Türkiye reveal four intersecting currents: anthropomorphism, privacy, technological attachment, and relational positioning. Participants often invest their devices with personality, affection, and trust, even while recognising their role in surveillance and data extraction. These ambivalent relationships reveal the home as a site where affect and automation intertwine, where gendered voices, emotional labor, and algorithmic listening reconfigure everyday rituals. By treating AI systems as active social actors rather than neutral tools, the article situates digital assistants within broader debates on posthuman domesticity, emotional technologization, and the remaking of home in the age of smart living.

Authors

• Fulya Şenay Avcı, Mersin University

• Glenn Walter Muschert, Khalifa Univ of Science & Technology