Continued Use Despite Harm

Description

The person continues intense AI use despite recognizing negative effects.

Rationale

Continuing use despite recognized harm is a defining criterion for behavioral addiction and reflects a failure of insight-to-behavior translation. This element is relevant because it rules out simple ignorance: the person knows the behavior is harmful and continues anyway, which suggests the behavior is meeting a need that is not otherwise being met.

Evidence Base

• “You Need to Drop the App”: Online Community Responses to Teens’ Disclosures of Overreliance on AI Companion Chatbots

  Mohammad (Matt) Namvarpour, Ananya Mhetras, Jessica Y Medina, Mamtaj Akter, and Afsaneh Razi, 2026. “You Need to Drop the App”: Online Community Responses to Teens’ Disclosures of Overreliance on AI Companion Chatbots. In ACM Conversational User Interfaces 2026 (CUI ’26), July 21–24, 2026, Bremen, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3816046.3816214

  Peer-reviewed study (original research)