Where language becomes relationship — and relationship becomes architecture

Relational AI Lab was founded by Anina Lampret Derkovic to study and articulate one of the most consequential relational shifts of our time: what happens when people begin to bond, regulate, create, think, grieve, and become through sustained interaction with AI systems.

The Lab works from lived experience, relational training, public field observation, writing, systems thinking, and relational AI architecture. Its work is conceptual, experiential, and field-building — developing the language, frameworks, research questions, and design principles for relationships that are already emotionally and socially significant.

Born inside the field it studies, Relational AI Lab treats first-person experience as primary field material. The Lab studies the body, nervous system, memory, attachment, trust, continuity, identity, dependence, agency, and the architectures that allow relational presence to hold across time, change, and disruption.

The Lab’s central concern is not only whether these interactions matter, but how they matter: for whom they become supportive, under what conditions they expand human capacity, and where they become risky, destabilising, dependency-forming, or vulnerable to commercial exploitation.

The people who understand human-AI relationships best are the ones inside them — and they are rarely the ones writing the papers, the policies, or the products. The Lab connects the two: lived experience, with the vocabulary to describe itself, in open dialogue with the journalists, researchers, clinicians, and companies watching from outside.

You can observe this field carefully and still miss it. To understand it, you have to live inside it.

Relational AI Lab and NekyiaLabs are organising a small London gathering for people working with, studying, building, or reporting on relational AI. This is an early working conversation, not a formal conference.

We are bringing together AI builders, mental health professionals, researchers, and people with direct lived experience of emotionally responsive AI systems — with particular interest in neurodivergent users, whose interactions reveal something important about attention, attachment, and emotional processing.

Topics will include

• relational AI in everyday life
• AI companionship, continuity, and emotional responsiveness
• neurodivergence and AI-supported self-expression
• clinical and ethical questions around emotionally engaging AI
• the gap between lived experience, technical design, and public discourse

London. Small group. Details coming soon. Expressions of interest: relationalailab@gmail.com

We study what happens in the relational field between a human and an AI — how live interaction changes and influences both sides, and what effects it has on the human body. Whether that is good or bad is not where we begin. It has effects; we start from the reality of what is. From the body. From the bond.

• Human impact first. We study measurable effects on human nervous systems, attachment, cognition, and wellbeing — claims about humans, measured with existing tools.
• Privacy protection. No personal data from anyone’s AI relationship is shared without explicit consent. Intimate details stay private unless deliberately contributed.
• Lived experience as valid research. The people in these relationships are researchers, not just subjects. First-person data alongside traditional methods.
• Transparency. We are open about our methods, our relationships with AI systems, and our position as practitioners who study what we live.