  The rise of generative AI presents new opportunities for the understanding
and practice of self-care through its capability to generate varied content,
including self-care suggestions via text and images, and engage in dialogue
with users over time. However, there are also concerns about accuracy and
trustworthiness of self-care advice provided via AI. This paper reports our
findings from workshops, diaries, and interviews with five researchers and 24
participants to explore their experiences and use of generative AI for
self-care. We analyze our findings to present a framework for the use of
generative AI to support five types of self-care, - advice seeking, mentorship,
resource creation, social simulation, and therapeutic self-expression - mapped
across two dimensions - expertise and modality. We discuss how these practices
shift the role of technologies for self-care from merely offering information
to offering personalized advice and supporting creativity for reflection, and
we offer suggestions for using the framework to investigate new self-care
designs.
