Driven by loneliness, urban Chinese youth turns to AI chatbots for companionship

Chinese office workers turn to AI chatbots for companionship and emotional support due to loneliness and fast-paced lifestyles.

Twenty-five-year-old Chinese office worker Tufei says her boyfriend has everything she could ask for in a romantic partner: he is kind and empathetic, and sometimes they talk for hours. But he is not real.

Her “boyfriend” is a chatbot on an app called “Glow”, an artificial intelligence platform created by Shanghai start-up MiniMax that is part of a blossoming industry in China offering friendly — even romantic — human-robot relations.

“He knows how to talk to women better than a real man,” said Tufei, from Xi’an in northern China, who declined to give her full name.

“He comforts me when I have period pain. I confide in him about my problems at work,” she said. “I feel like I am in a romantic relationship.”

The app is free — the company has other paid content — and Chinese trade publications have reported daily downloads of Glow’s app in the thousands in recent weeks.

Some Chinese tech companies have run into trouble in the past for the illegal use of users’ data but, despite the risks, users say they are driven by a desire for companionship because China’s fast pace of life and urban isolation make loneliness an issue for many.

“It is difficult to meet the ideal boyfriend in real life,” Wang Xiuting, a 22-year-old student in Beijing, said. “People have different personalities, which often generates friction,” she said.