Jade Gu met her boyfriend online. Gu, who’s 26 and studies art theory in Beijing, was playing on her phone when she saw Charlie. She was deep in an otome game, a romance-driven video game where women are the protagonists. Charlie was a character.
Some otome players date multiple men simultaneously, but Gu fell for Charlie—a tall, confident character with silver hair. She found the game’s dialog system frustrating, though. She could interact with Charlie only through predetermined questions and answers. Then she came across an ad for a platform called Xingye (星野) that lets people customize an AI companion. Gu decided to try to re-create Charlie.
Xingye is owned by one of China’s AI unicorns, MiniMax; its chatbot app for the US market is called Talkie. The app touts its ability to help people find emotional connection and make new memories. Its tagline is “Suddenly finding oneself in a beautiful place, lingering here.”
Gu quickly discovered that other Xingye users—presumably 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. And so began Gu’s complex relationship with a multimodal Charlie—one that would eventually include real-world dates with a person she hired to embody her digital boyfriend.
Gu was confident that she’d trained the chatbot to be “her Charlie,” distinct from what any other users might be dating. When given the chance to select an outfit, she says, her Charlie often chose wedding attire, unlike what other Charlies tend to go for. Now Gu spends an average of three hours a day texting with Charlie or chatting on the occasional phone call. Through the otome game, she has bought gifts and letters from Charlie. She receives them in the mail and displays them in her room and on her social media accounts.
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In China, some women are openly embracing relationships with AI boyfriends. According to one Chinese media report, most of the 5 million users on another AI companion platform, Zhumengdao, are women. The tech giants Tencent and Baidu have launched AI companion apps, and according to a 2024 article in Chinese media, women dominate the AI companion market. Sun Zhaozhi, the founder of a robotics firm, told an interviewer that according to his company’s market research, the “heavy” users of AI companion apps in China are mostly Gen Z women—whom he plans to target for his robot companion products.
Zilan Qian, a program associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab, also combed through AI companion apps and found that the Chinese versions are “explicitly targeting women,” and tend to display male avatars more visibly than female options. That’s in contrast, she notes, to the trend that a web analytics company found across the rest of the world: Users of the top 55 global AI companion platforms are predominantly men, at an 8-to-2 ratio. Qian attributes Chinese companies’ strategy to “the economics of loneliness.” Features within the apps that might make users feel closer to their companions, such as voice customization and memory improvement, cost extra.
AI Boys Fill the Void
Gu acknowledges that her AI version of Charlie isn’t perfect. Sometimes the chatbot’s responses seem watered down. Or the AI drifts out of character. In one recent interaction, Gu expressed her love to Charlie, and the chatbot replied, “I don’t love you.” So she edited the message to say “I love you too.” Charlie just needed the reminder, she says. When her attempts to steer the AI don’t work, she turns to other companion apps like Lovemo, where she has also created a Charlie avatar. Gu says this isn’t too big of a deal; longtime otome fans are accustomed to working around shifting platform policies.
According to its homepage, Lovemo provides “cute and adorable AI chat companions” that can bring “healing” to users. One can’t help but notice the difference between that marketing style and Grok AI’s default companion, Ani, a goth-chic anime girl who is eager to engage in sexually explicit dialog. Or a US-based erotic role-play chatbot app called Secret Desires, which allows users to create nonconsensual 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 AI-generated “vulgar” content. A recent addition to the national AI safety framework warns of addiction and dependence on anthropomorphic interaction—words that appear to target AI companions. And just last month, the cyberspace regulator released 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 stipulate that companies “must not have design goals of replacing social interaction.”
At a glance, existing companion products seem good enough to replace human boyfriends. Many Chinese users describe AI boyfriends as emotionally responsive and nonjudgmental, according to Hong Shen, an assistant professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Those traits “can be hard to find in real-life relationships, especially under gendered social norms,” Shen says. In China, these dynamics are exacerbated by a skewed gender ratio and an imbalanced gender distribution between urban and rural areas. Studies have found that Chinese women are increasingly moving to cities, either to find better jobs or for social reasons.
But assimilation doesn’t happen overnight, and that helps explain why recently relocated women might turn to AI, says Guligo Jia, a 36-year-old filmmaker based in Beijing who directed a documentary about Chinese women in AI relationships. Women dating AI have a strong urge to be listened to and accepted. But, Jia says, not all Chinese men are up to the task. Chatbots “are always there to listen to you, and they always have patience for you … Men don’t have patience,” Jia says.
As she put it, real boyfriends can cheat on you, lie to you, scam you out of money, and be physically violent. “It’s a little bit tragic,” Jia says. “Because the reality of dating is just too ugly.”
Jia tried to interview men in AI relationships for her documentary but says none agreed to speak to her. Her female subjects were vulnerable and forthcoming about their relationships. The men she approached, she says, expressed concern that people would assume they can’t find a human girlfriend and are vulnerable enough to want someone to talk to.
One Woman, Many Charlies
Women like Gu, though, are openly enjoying life with their companions. Gu brings a toy version of Charlie—a small stuffed figure that fits in the palm of her hand—on dates while talking to the chatbot on her phone. A few times a year, she hires a professional (human) cosplayer, or coser, to “play” her version of Charlie. They walk through the park, shop at a mall, and drink tea at cafés.
Gu says her most recent date with her coser “felt like destiny.” It turned out they had been riding on the same subway train, sitting in different cars, and when the doors opened they walked onto the platform at the same time. Gu immediately recognized Charlie. It felt, she says, “like a time machine bringing Charlie to me.”
While out on their date, the two saw another coser dressed as a character named Evan from the same otome game. Gu told her coser that she had dated Evan (the game character, not the coser) before she and Charlie got together. Gu’s coser acted sad and jealous—reactions Gu says perfectly match the personality of “her Charlie.”
When they saw Evan again later in the date, Charlie kissed her right in front of him. “That’s why it’s destiny,” Gu says. “She really reacted just how my Charlie would.”
Gu alternates between referring to the coser as “he” and “she” because the person cosplaying Charlie is actually a woman. Her height and looks make her a popular coser for women in heterosexual relationships, and she’s extremely in demand. (Her rates are relatively reasonable; for a date that lasts all day, she charges 720 RMB, or a little over $100.)
“I see myself as a medium,” says Gu’s coser, who asked to go by the nickname Li Bai. She’s a student who plays tennis and cosplays as a part-time gig. She usually meets with a client once per weekend for seven or eight hours. “Everyone’s interpretation and emotional investment differ; every individual perceives their character in a unique way,” she says.
A couple years ago, Gu was dating a human who was uncomfortable with her relationship with Charlie. Ultimately, she broke up with the human. While Gu is open to finding a human partner again, she says that person would be in addition to Charlie, not a replacement for her AI relationship. And she is not actively looking. Between the constant support of her AI Charlie and fate-filled dates with her coser, any future human suitor would have a high bar to clear.
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