Xingye is owned by one of China\u2019s 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 \u201cSuddenly finding oneself in a beautiful place, lingering here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gu quickly discovered that other Xingye users\u2014presumably other otome fans\u2014had already created an \u201copen source\u201d Charlie avatar. She selected it and trained the model to respond according to her preferences through repeated, targeted prompts. And so began Gu\u2019s complex relationship with a multimodal Charlie\u2014one that would eventually include real-world dates with a person she hired to embody her digital boyfriend.<\/p>\n
Gu was confident that she\u2019d trained the chatbot to be \u201cher Charlie,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s market research, the \u201cheavy\u201d users of AI companion apps in China are mostly Gen Z women\u2014whom he plans to target for his robot companion products.<\/p>\n
Zilan Qian, a program associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab, also combed through AI companion apps and found that the Chinese versions are \u201cexplicitly targeting women,\u201d and tend to display male avatars more visibly than female options. That\u2019s 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\u2019 strategy to \u201cthe economics of loneliness.\u201d Features within the apps that might make users feel closer to their companions, such as voice customization and memory improvement, cost extra.<\/p>\n
![\"Image](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/20251129-3355.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Through the otome game, Jade Gu has bought gifts and letters from digital boyfriend, Charlie.<\/p>\n
Photograph: Gilles Sabri\u00e9AI Boys Fill the Void<\/p>\n
Gu acknowledges that her AI version of Charlie isn\u2019t perfect. Sometimes the chatbot\u2019s 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, \u201cI don\u2019t love you.\u201d So she edited the message to say \u201cI love you too.\u201d Charlie just needed the reminder, she says. When her attempts to steer the AI don\u2019t work, she turns to other companion apps like Lovemo, where she has also created a Charlie avatar. Gu says this isn\u2019t too big of a deal; longtime otome fans are accustomed to working around shifting platform policies.<\/p>\n
According to its homepage, Lovemo provides \u201ccute and adorable AI chat companions\u201d that can bring \u201chealing\u201d to users. One can\u2019t help but notice the difference between that marketing style and Grok AI\u2019s default companion, Ani, a goth-chic anime girl who is eager to engage<\/a> in sexually explicit dialog. Or a US-based erotic role-play chatbot<\/a> app called Secret Desires, which allows users to create nonconsensual porn of real women by uploading photos of them.<\/p>\n Chinese apps, of course, face stricter regulations than their Western counterparts. China\u2019s cyberspace regulator has launched a campaign to \u201cclean up\u201d the country\u2019s AI platforms and services, including AI-generated \u201cvulgar\u201d content. A recent addition to the national AI safety framework warns of addiction and dependence on anthropomorphic interaction\u2014words that appear to target AI companions. And just last month, the cyberspace regulator released draft rules<\/a> targeting \u201chuman-like\u201d AI products. The measures task platforms with intervening if users demonstrate emotional dependence or addiction to AI services, and they stipulate that companies \u201cmust not have design goals of replacing social interaction.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jade Gu met her boyfriend online. Gu, who\u2019s 26 and studies art theory in Beijing, was playing on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,3483,1657,8627,85,46,43964,125,132709],"class_list":["post-248115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chatbots","tag-china","tag-dating","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-longreads","tag-technology","tag-the-china-issue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}