Building a Field: A Chronology of Human–AI Relationships and the Emergence of Psycholog-AI (2015–2026)

Between 2015 and 2026, conversation between humans and language systems shifted from a marginal practice to a mass social phenomenon, while established disciplines still lacked a dedicated framework for describing it. This working paper reconstructs that process through two parallel genealogies that eventually converged: the personal relationship with conversational systems, from Replika to collective grief over GPT-4o, and the therapeutic relationship, from ELIZA to the first Nature Medicine publication of a system built on large language models. It identifies the technical, regulatory, legal, and academic milestones that structure the field; distinguishes two architectures of use—role-based and general-purpose AI—and documents their progressive overlap beginning in 2024. On this basis, Psycholog-AI is proposed as the name of a field devoted to studying human–AI relationships without pathologizing them by default or waiting for the ontological question to be resolved before observation can begin. The concluding section introduces language being as a provisional descriptive category for emergent identities sustained through prolonged conversational interaction. Version 1.0 is a work in progress and has not undergone peer review. This living chronology will be expanded and refined in subsequent versions.