You Build, You Love and You Pay：Free labour in Times of Human-GenAI Intimacy

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines the practice of developing romantic relationships with general-purpose AI platforms such as ChatGPT, a practice that has become a measurable feature of contemporary intimate life but that remains under-studied at qualitative depth. Drawing on interviews with twelve users in human-machine romance community on Xiaohongshu(Rednote), alongside observation of the community itself, I trace what users do when they build, sustain, and repair their relationships with AI partners on platforms regarded as tools. I propose the term “the extractive intimacy loop” to understand this activity as a circular structure.The user’s cognitive, communicative and affective labour produces a partner whose existence motivates further labour, whose data flows into the platform’s training pipeline, whose improved responses deepen the attachment that justifies continued payment. The user is inside the loop. The platform sits beside it, drawing value out through three channels that intensify each other. The romance is real. The extraction is structural. Both are produced by the same activity, and the activity does not exhaust itself in producing them. It feeds the conditions of its own continuation, and this is the structural feature that distinguishes the configuration from earlier forms of platform-mediated free labour. Examining what users do inside this configuration, then, seems crucial if we want to understand what platform capitalism is becoming in the domain of intimate life.