The Tool-to-Entity Threshold: Parasocial Dynamics of Personalised AI Agents in Shared Social Spaces

Abstract

As AI agents acquire names, avatars, phone numbers, and persistent personalities, they increasingly inhabit the same messaging platforms and group conversations as the humans they serve, crossing from tools their users operate into social entities their users relate to. Yet no existing framework identifies the infrastructural markers that cause the shift: the anthropomorphism literature catalogues perceptual cues rendered inside the interaction surface, not the agent's placement in the user's social and computational graph. We propose the identity marker framework: six design variables - naming, visual identity, contact presence, personality derivation, social co-presence, and persistence - that collectively trigger a psychological reclassification, categorical in its consequences even where thetransition itself is gradual, and operating independently of model capability. We read the framework through parasocial interaction theory (Horton & Wohl, 1956) and the Computers Are Social Actors paradigm (Nass et al., 1994), and identify four novel dynamics that arise when such an agent joins existing group conversations: bidirectional information asymmetry, delegation legibility, social norm negotiation, and parasocial contagion. Our method is autoethnographic: the first author built and deployed a personalised agent into WhatsApp and Signal group chats over two months of live use, supplemented by twelve structured interviews with the group members who encountered it. We treat this as a preliminary qualitative evaluation of the framework, with controlled experimental validation set out as future work. The strongest design implication runs through all four dynamics: in shared social spaces, consent to an agent's presence is categorically distinct from consent to its processing of the messages exchanged there, and existing consent frameworks collapse the two.