Jade Gu met her boyfriend online. Gu, who is 26 and studies art theory in Beijing, was playing on her phone when she saw Charlie. She was immersed in an otome game, a romantic video game in which women are the protagonists. Charlie was a character.
Some otome players date multiple men simultaneously, but Gu fell in love with Charlie, a tall, confident figure with silver hair. She did, however, find the game’s dialogue system frustrating. She could only interact with Charlie through predetermined questions and answers. Then she came across an ad for a platform called Xingye (星野) that allows people to personalize a AI Companion. Gu decided to try to recreate Charlie.
Xingye belongs to one of China’s AI unicorns, MiniMax; its chatbot application for the US market is called Talkie. The app touts its ability to help people find emotional connection and create new memories. Its slogan is “Suddenly find yourself in a beautiful place, linger here”.
Gu soon discovered that other Xingye users – likely other otome fans – had already created an “open source” Charlie avatar. She selected it and trained the model to respond according to her preferences through repeated, targeted prompts. Thus began Gu’s complex relationship with a multimodal Charlie — a relationship that would eventually include real-world dates with someone she hired to play her digital boyfriend.
Gu was convinced that she had trained the chatbot to be “her Charlie,” separate from the one other users might hang out with. When given the chance to choose an outfit, she says, her Charlie often chooses a wedding outfit, unlike what other Charlies tend to choose. Today, Gu spends an average of three hours a day texting Charlie or chatting in occasional phone calls. Through the otome game, she bought Charlie gifts and letters. She receives them in the mail and posts them in her room and on her social media accounts.
In China, some women openly embrace relationships with AI boyfriends. According to a Chinese media outlet, most of the 5 million users of another complementary AI platform, Zhumengdao, are women. Tech giants Tencent and Baidu have launched AI companion applications, and according to a 2024 article in Chinese media, women dominate the AI companion market. Sun Zhaozhi, founder of a robotics company, told an interviewer that, according to his company’s market research, the “heavy” users of AI companion applications in China are mostly female Generation Z, whom he plans to target for his robotic companion products.
Zilan Qian, an associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab program, also combed through AI-related applications and found that Chinese versions “explicitly target women” and tend to display male avatars more prominently than female options. This contrasts, she notes, with the trend one web analytics firm has seen in the rest of the world: users of the world’s 55 major AI support platforms are overwhelmingly male, by a ratio of 8 to 2. Qian attributes Chinese companies’ strategy to the “loneliness economy.” App features that could make users feel closer to their companions, such as voice personalization and memory enhancement, cost more.
AI boys fill the void
Gu acknowledges that his AI version of Charlie isn’t perfect. Sometimes the chatbot’s responses seem watered down. Or the AI loses its character. In a recent interaction, Gu expressed his love to Charlie and the chatbot responded, “I don’t love you. » So she edited the message to say “I love you too.” Charlie just needed a reminder, she said. When her attempts to control the AI don’t work, she turns to other companion apps like Lovemo, where she also created a Charlie avatar. Gu says it’s not too bad; Longtime otome fans are used to working around changing platform policies.
According to its homepage, Lovemo provides “cute and adorable AI chat companions” that can provide “healing” to users. One can’t help but notice the difference between this marketing style and Grok AI’s default companion, Ani, a goth-chic anime girl who is willing to get involved in sexually explicit dialogue. Or a US-based company erotic roleplay chatbot app called Secret Desires, which allows users to create non-consensual porn of real women by uploading photos of them.
Chinese apps, of course, face stricter regulations than their Western counterparts. China’s cyberspace regulator has launched a campaign to “clean up” the country’s AI platforms and services, including “vulgar” AI-generated content. A recent addition to the National AI Safety Framework warns of addiction and reliance on anthropomorphic interactions – words that appear to target AI companions. And last month, the cyberspace regulator published draft rules targeting “human-like” AI products. The measures task platforms with intervening if users demonstrate emotional dependence or addiction to AI services, and they state that companies “shall not have a design goal of replacing social interaction.”