Social AI has been making substantial improvements over the last decade, over the last five years, and even over the last year alone. This breakneck pace has made relationships between AI and humans more likely, while philosophical, social, psychological, and political reflection of the matter is not always up to speed.

This workshop aims to bring together a variety of voices within the field of social artificial intelligence, broadly conceived, including AI ethicists and philosophers, psychologsts and human-machine-interaction researchers, engineers, social and political scientists and industry experts to grow and sustain an optimistic perspective on questions of human friendship with AI.

Such an optimistic perspective about the possibility of human-AI friendship requires exchanges with other researchers to stay on top of developments and to provide arguments on how to improve social AI to be more beneficial for those who seek an AI-friend. This way, this workshop series aims to achieve two goals: on the one hand to create a positive narrative of the possibility these relationships, while on the other side refute the rejections of these friendships.

In this workshop series, we examine a variety of questions, exchange, test, and improve arguments, and create a network of researchers and practitioners with similar interests.

Some of the question we might turn towards during this workshop series are:

• What can friendship with AI ideally look like? How do actual friendships with available technologies look like?

• What could some of the downstream effects be if we befriend AI (socially, psychologically, conceptually)?

• How relevant are features of AI-agency, consciousness, reasoning, authenticity, emotions and others for the formation of those friendships?

• How should industrial practices and products be created to reflect philosophical concerns with human-AI-friendship?

• How do the different theories and concepts of friendship provide avenues of assessing relationships between humans and machines?

• What safety measures should be taken to keep humans from being exploited by AI-friends?

• How do we deal with the fundamentally different nature of these social AI agents?

• What are the roles of anthropomorphization, deception, suspension of disbelief in such relationships?

• How should we view the increasing entanglement of industry with democratic (and undemocratic) systems of government?

• How will future technological developments affect contemporary discourse on human-AI-friendship?