Young men and women seem to be increasingly fed up with one another. In the physical world, they are spending less time hanging out face-to-face. In the digital world, their attempts to date on apps often stall at the “talking stage” because they fear being hurt or rejected. And in the political world, they seem to be moving in different directions entirely.
From the US to Germany, South Korea to Tunisia, ideological gaps have opened up between young women (who are more liberal) and young men (who are more conservative).
Enter stage right: AI boyfriends and girlfriends. It is hard to imagine more fertile ground for the arrival of chatbots that live on your screen, won’t hurt or reject you, and can be designed to embody your desires and endorse your values.
It should probably be no surprise, then, that AI romantic relationships have started to take off. While we prod and poke at the employment and productivity data to try to detect whether AI is rewiring the economy, is it possible that a profound rewiring of the social realm is beginning to happen while we look the other way?
In recent years, scores of AI companion platforms have sprung up, such as Replika and Character.ai. One survey of US adults found that 19 per cent had chatted with an AI system meant to emulate a romantic partner, with higher rates for young men and women (31 and 23 per cent, respectively).
Young men seem the keenest users in the US, the same is not true everywhere.
In an article titled Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends, Zilan Qian, a fellow at the Oxford China Policy Lab, explains that the leading Chinese AI companion platforms tend to feature male characters on their homepages. Their target audience is not lonely young men in their parents’ basements, she says, but educated city-dwelling women aged between 25 and 35.
In China, the disconnect between young men and women has a geographical component. Since 2009, women have outnumbered men in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at Chinese universities. As a result, they have been more likely to move to cities to find work, while young men have been more likely to remain at home.
Will anyone settle for a flawed human when they’ve become accustomed to an always-attentive bot which never leaves its socks lying around the house?
“This group of urban women has been the target of a lot of products,” Qian told The Irish Times. “They call it the economy of loneliness.”
On top of that, she said, you have “the rise of feminism in China, more media spotlight on domestic violence ... and then there’s still very strong workplace gender discrimination. I think that all combined [leads to] women wanting to at least try an AI boyfriend”.
[ The lure of AI companionship poses a real danger to vulnerable peopleOpens in new window ]
How serious those relationships are is hard to say. Qian says there are plenty of posts from women on social media about their AI boyfriends, but it’s possible they are attempts to gain followers or attention. Conversely, it’s possible that others might want to hide the depth of the attachments they have formed for fear of social judgment.
There are good reasons to worry about human relationships with AI models. Most obviously: these are commercial companies which will want to monetise their users, which could create incentives to emotionally manipulate people into spending more time and money on their AI companions.
Already, according to a blog published by the Ada Lovelace Institute, a common feature of premium subscriptions to AI companions is additional storage which allows the memorisation of previous conversations. In other words, users have to pay “a recurring fee to prevent their companion from forgetting them”.
An even bigger danger, it seems to me, is the potential impact on humans’ relationships with one another. As it stands, dating apps have encouraged people to treat looking for a partner a bit like online shopping: the temptation is always to keep swiping in search of a more perfect match.
Will anyone settle for a flawed human when they’ve become accustomed to an always-attentive bot which never leaves its socks lying around the house?
In December, China’s cyber regulator issued draft rules to tighten oversight of AI designed to simulate human personalities, such as to require providers to warn against excessive use and intervene if users show signs of addiction. Qian thinks the Chinese government has one nervous eye on the already plummeting birth rate. It might have a point.
We have heard a lot lately from tech leaders about how their invention could become sentient and blow us all up. But what if it goes another way? With apologies to TS Eliot, maybe this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whisper from your AI lover. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
