South Korea's Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced Wednesday it will launch the AI Loneliness Vital Index (AI-LOVI), the first international measurement framework to track whether artificial intelligence is making human loneliness better or worse at a population scale. The announcement addresses a gap described as the reason AI companion platform regulation remains largely unenforceable: no government or multilateral body currently has agreed-upon metrics for emotional dependency, erosion of social connection, or parasocial AI attachment at scale. A May 2026 analysis by Fathom AI identified this as one of four structural gaps making companion chatbot governance effectively stuck. KAIST will formally unveil AI-LOVI on August 18 at the Global Conference on Loneliness in the Age of AI, scheduled from 9:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at the Jeong Geun-Mo Conference Hall (Building E9) on KAIST's main Daejeon campus, with simultaneous Korean-English interpretation. Representatives from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Health Organization (WHO), and government and research experts from the United Kingdom, Japan, Thailand, and Germany are confirmed to attend. The conference will adopt the Daejeon Declaration on Loneliness in the Age of AI. Online registration was open through August 17; on-site registration will be available on the day. AI-LOVI combines three sub-indices: the Survey Loneliness Index (S-LI