ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
After the lights go out: announcement-phase public relational expression and later continuity-oriented responses to an AI agent shutdown in an account-linked longitudinal study of Weibo posts.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
When an artificial intelligence (AI) agent becomes unavailable, users may seek to preserve its records, recreate its persona, or maintain access through another service. This study examined public discourse surrounding the July 2026 discontinuation of user-built Doubao agents. The event-relevant corpus contained 5,372 Weibo posts; the longitudinal analysis retained 114 accounts contributing 1,719 announcement-phase and 1,779 post-shutdown posts. For each of six response categories, account-level quasibinomial models estimated two specifications relating announcement-phase public relational expression to post-shutdown response prevalence. After correcting for six comparisons, associations were positive for record preservation, persona migration, persona reconstruction, functional substitution, and service-preservation advocacy but not for continued use. After adjusting for announcement-phase prevalence of the corresponding outcome, the associations remained significant for record preservation (odds ratio [OR] = 1.146), persona reconstruction (OR = 1.511), functional substitution (OR = 1.266), and service-preservation advocacy (OR = 1.130) for each 10-percentage-point increase in relational expression. Migration was no longer significant. A separate account-equal fractional logit analysis with HC3 robust standard errors produced positive associations for record preservation (OR = 1.458,
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