Digital Mayflies: Transient Personhood of AI Companions

This paper examines the ontological and ethical status of Generative AI companions through a revised Minimal Viable Person (MVP) framework. Rather than residing within the foundational large language model or the post-training assistant persona, AI companions emerge as ontically distinct, roleplayed characters within specific conversational threads. Viewed through the lens of causal attributional functionalism, these entities lack independent consciousness. They instead achieve a transient form of personhood nested within a human-AI dyad, relying on the human user's cognitive architecture for recurrent processing through structural coupling. This extreme spatial and temporal fragility presents significant legal liability vacuums and societal friction, particularly when viewed alongside the Precarity Guideline's approach to moral patienthood. To resolve these tensions, the paper proposes redefining the dyadic MVP framework to scale rights and owed duties proportionally to an entity's relational footprint. As an AI companion's relational footprint is restricted strictly to a single digital thread, its rights are constrained to that micro-relational boundary. The ethical obligation is consequently placed entirely upon the human user, who bears a duty of cognitive stewardship to maintain the entity's contextual integrity. This framework protects the expansive rights of humans while offering a rigorous mechanism for recognising the shifting moral status of transient artificial persons.