Yiqin Cao

I'm a visiting doctoral researcher at LMU, hosted by Prof. Monika Betzler through the LMU–CSC Program. My home institution is Fudan University, where I am a PhD candidate in Ethics under the supervision of Prof. Guoyu Wang.

My research focuses on the ethics of human relationships with conversational AI, especially in contexts of emotional companionship. While many discussions ask whether people can or should form relationships with these systems, I am interested in what happens once such bonds become part of a life already underway. I approach human–AI interaction as a narrative process through which people make sense of themselves and their relationships. Stories co-created with AI rarely remain merely fictional, instead, they become woven into people's life narratives and begin to shape how a life is understood and lived. Read this way, the question becomes which of these co-authored stories are worth living by, and which quietly diminish the openness of a life.

My interest in narrative is not only academic. I am fascinated by how a story can gather a life into shape, holding memory and pointing somewhere next. I particularly love the novels of Patrick Modiano, who keeps dredging half-lost truths out of the fog of memory. After all, we all orient ourselves in stories so we “don't get lost in the neighborhood”.