Love for Believable AI: Artificial Partiality and Relationship Persistence as an Engineerable Stance

Sebastian Cochinescu

We study a behavioral mechanism for artificial partiality in conversational agents. The paper reports no human-subjects data and makes no claim about attachment, trust, perceived mind, or machine interiority. Partiality has two components: caring, defined as allocation of a finite interaction surplus above a guaranteed per-user service floor, and particularity, defined as a per-user state estimate accumulated from relationship history on fixed inference machinery. We implement both as a persistence layer over one open-weight base model and evaluate them on constructed multi-session relationships with known hidden-state schedules. A four-channel divergence compares known-user and stranger conditions on identical probes with paired generation seeds; the stranger prompt is not length-matched, and one channel (initiative) is an allocator output rather than generated behavior. The full mechanism reproduces the ordinal shape, but not the magnitude, of an analytically specified curve and is the only arm satisfying the protocol-defined joint signature on the calibrated battery. The initial mechanism fails probe-quality equivalence because relationship content reduces topical relevance. A…