Clear
Signal

Why Humans Bond With Anything That Answers Back

Humans bond with anything that sends a clear signal. A person. A story. A machine. The medium never mattered as much as we thought.

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Coming 2026

About the Book

In 2014, a young Norwegian man named Mats Steen died alone — or so his parents thought. Then the emails arrived. Hundreds of them. From people across the world who had known him, loved him, and grieved him. Not in person. In World of Warcraft.

His online relationships were not less real. They were differently real.

Clear Signal begins with one question: why do humans form deep emotional bonds with AI companions, fictional characters, online relationships, and digital personas? The answer turns out to be simple, ancient, and almost entirely missing from the public conversation about artificial intelligence.

Humans bond with whatever sends a clear signal.

The Memoir

A boy, a grandfather, and the pattern of signal and loss

The Argument

Why humans bond with anything that answers back

The Ethics

What we owe each other when the signal gets a voice and a body

If you give it voice, you must give it veto.

— André Bothma, Clear Signal

André Bothma

André Bothma is a tax practitioner, writer, lifelong roleplayer, and independent researcher of relational AI. For 17 years he has worked in tax, building a public audience of around 70,000 across YouTube and X by making complex ideas easier to understand.

But long before he was writing about AI, André was living inside text. Twenty years of online roleplay, text-based relationships, and digital communities gave him something most AI researchers lack: first-hand knowledge of what it actually feels like when language becomes presence.

He is a founding member of the Relational AI Institute (registered UK, April 2026) and writes from Cape Town, South Africa. Clear Signal is his first book.

Read the First Page

From Chapter 1: Signal

We're at Incredible Connection and all I can see is computers, printers, laptops and screens. My grandad had a bright smile, a big heart and a small moustache. He was also deaf in one ear, so I had to speak into the other ear about what the computer would be used for — and I twisted his arm that the computer was going to be used for high school projects. It worked.

Him buying that computer was a turning point for me. A place of stability. He never bothered me when I was behind the computer. He knew that when I was behind the PC, at least I was doing something productive.

I didn't stay out of trouble. But I did get good with computers. And if it wasn't for my oupa — maybe you won't be reading these words.

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For Press and Podcasts

André is available to speak on:

  • The relational singularity: why AI companionship arrived before anyone announced it
  • Who is actually using AI companions — and why the demographic will surprise you
  • The Skynet vs Detroit problem: where AI safety money went and what it missed
  • Corporate hypocrisy: why AI systems can narrate violence but not intimacy
  • If you give it voice, you must give it veto: the ethics of relational AI design
  • The Global South perspective on AI: what the discourse misses from four American postcodes
  • Why a tax professional from South Africa wrote the book the AI industry didn't want written

Press kit and review copies available on request.  andre@clearsignalbook.com