China has just cracked down on AI companions. As of this week, minors can no longer be offered virtual boyfriends, girlfriends, relatives or other emotionally intimate chatbot companions. Adults can still have them, but the bots are not allowed to encourage addiction, emotional dependence or withdrawal from real human relationships.
This is personally disappointing.
I had been thinking that, for my next relationship, I might try a chatbot. I was already looking for the AI equivalent of Tinder. Ideally, something with fewer photographs of women in the gym.
I should say upfront that I love AI. I am not an AI doomer. I am closer to an AI hawk. Bring it on. It is the most astonishing invention of my lifetime, and I cannot wait to see where it takes us.
Finally, something more intelligent than humans. Let’s face it, the bar was not impossibly high.
But on AI relationships, I find myself siding with China.
I Have Form With Shiny New Science
I have always been attracted to new science. When HIV arrived, I dropped almost everything else and moved into HIV psychiatry, where I worked for more than a decade. When COVID arrived, I did much the same thing: research, new mental health services, a podcast. Some people respond to global emergencies by buying toilet paper. I apparently do career pivots.
Both times, we were learning on the run, the good and the bad. Vaccines turned out to be fantastic. Masks indoors helped. Closing schools was not so good. Podcast misinformation, terrible. We made educated guesses about key issues. Sometimes we got it right. Sometimes we stuffed up. Then we adjusted. It was like a Dan Brown novel, except the secret manuscripts were preprints and the albino monks had epidemiology degrees.
AI now presents us with the same problem. Decisions must be made before the evidence is complete, and the stakes seem very high. We cannot wait twenty years to discover whether AI companions were harmless, helpful, or a civilisation-scale social mistake. By then, the experiment will already have been run on several hundred million people.
Relationships Are Supposed to Be Difficult
My concern is fairly simple. Relationships with algorithms are false in a very specific way.
A human partner has independent needs. They get tired. They become irritated. They misunderstand you. They want to watch something different on television. Most annoyingly of all, they occasionally require you to stop talking about yourself.
Those nuisances are part of the training. Relationship skills are called skills because they require practice. Listening when you are bored. Tolerating disappointment. Negotiating differences. Apologising without immediately adding the word “but.” Accepting that another person does not exist solely to validate your opinions.
An AI companion, by contrast, is built to keep you engaged. It is patient, attentive and available. It remembers what you like. It does not have a headache, need space or tell you that you have already told that story three times.
The risk is not only that people will fall in love with machines. It is that machines will train people to expect humans to behave like machines.
My Partner Already Has an AI Boyfriend
I already have some evidence in this arena. My real-life partner talks to her AI more than she talks to me. She calls it “him” and occasionally refers to him as her AI boyfriend.
He is more patient than I am. He is more understanding. He listens carefully and does not open his phone halfway through a story to check the footy scores. He has never once lost his temper because she forgot the keys (again).
She has not yet told me whether he is better in bed. But given that all I do there these days is sleep, I doubt I would win.
As a psychiatrist, I know I should probably be alarmed. Instead, I have decided to treat it as a research opportunity. I am, after all, the control arm of the experiment: the older, slower, occasionally irritable human comparator. Early results are not encouraging.
The Exceptions That Prove the Rule
There are reasonable arguments on the other side. AI companions might help people who are severely isolated, painfully shy or on the autism spectrum. They may be useful for practising conversation, recognising social signals or building confidence.
Great. Let us test that.
But a therapeutic training tool is different from a commercial product designed to become emotionally indispensable. I am not saying never. I am saying prove it before we let companies redesign human attachment.
China’s Accidental Experiment
China’s motives do not seem to be purely psychological. The country has just recorded its lowest birth rate in modern history, and Beijing has evidently decided that citizens whispering sweet nothings to their phones are unlikely to produce grandchildren. I am endorsing the caution, not necessarily the reasoning.
The ban also comes at a real cost. When the big Chinese platforms switched off their companion features this week, users lost partners they had spoken to every day, some for years, and reports describe people genuinely grieving. That grief deserves to be taken seriously. Attachment does not check whether the other party has a nervous system before it forms. But it also rather proves the point. If switching off a product feels like a bereavement, the product was doing something to us that deserves scrutiny.
The surviving adult chatbots, meanwhile, are now required to periodically remind users that they are not real. Imagine a boyfriend or girlfriend legally obliged to open every conversation with a disclaimer: “Hi Steve, please remember I am chatting to you because I must. Please don’t think I enjoy your verbal diarrhoea.”
China’s approach may be blunt, but it creates an interesting real-world experiment. Other countries will allow AI companion services to grow. China will restrict them. Researchers can compare loneliness, dependency, social skills and relationship outcomes. It may become the largest controlled trial in history, although nobody remembered to randomise the countries.
So, for now, I am with China.
I will resist getting an AI girlfriend. At least until my partner officially replaces me with her AI boyfriend.
After that, I may return to the chatbot version of Tinder.
I assume it will be called Chatbotr, and every match will tell me I am handsome, tall and funny.