China's Regulators Take Aim at "AI Boyfriends"
spectrum.ieee.orgI kinda feel like if people have to turn to AI for companionship, it's the same as using AI for therapy - because the real thing isn't available and any number of systems have failed those people along the way.
In a sense, that might be a bit telling of the modern day society: in what world is it so difficult to make meaningful connections to people, that if a real human relationship can be like 5x more meaningful (made up numbers, but surely people will agree that a real relationship can have more depth) than whatever the AI can provide, and people still choose that over the real thing? Or maybe the average person kind of sucks, or the way relationships are treated sucks, or maybe the AI is like crack for impressionable brains, or people don't want a real relationship and just want some sycophantic whatever, I don't know.
Maybe it's a numbers game and some people will never find that for real (gender skew, demographics etc.), maybe it's a failing at those people not being properly socialized, maybe they themselves have something that society doesn't value ("Be yourself! No, not like that."), or just aren't pleasant for any number of reasons, don't have a third place to go for, don't have money to go and partake in social activities, have been brainwashed by hateful social media propaganda or any other mix of circumstances.
Feels like it's probably easier to ban AI and pretend all of the other issues don't exist, rather than addressing them.
If you took someone from the 1990s and dumped them in 2026, I think one of the biggest shocks to them would be how optional humans are everywhere. You can't get a human on the phone when you call a business anymore. We check out our own groceries with machines now. We order fast food from a kiosk or app instead of a person. Self-driving taxis. Robots doing work and AI making content. Apps mediating all kinds of relationships (personal, romantic, business, employee-employer) rather than the humans themselves. We've kind of just allowed technology to start making us all irrelevant. What is the return on this investment?
UBI or mass death, by my reckoning.
I've also got $50 on "massive fake jobs program", because the unemployment will be a social / psychological disaster even if the economics turn out to be straightforward.
> We've kind of just allowed technology to start making us all irrelevant.
That accelerated when big tech companies became advertisement companies. Suddenly, there was a push to increase time on the screen thru mass data gathering.
As far as it is profitable to keep people's noses glued to a screen there is going to be an increase on people that is alone and disconnected.
Even dating is done thru apps that promote looking for the perfect inexistent partner. The more you look for a partner and the less you get one the more profits they get. Something should have never been a business.
*was done through apps, people decided to get smart about this and finding people IRL or LinkedIn
> What is the return on this investment?
~$5T/year in profits from the US, concentrated to the ~10% of American households who hold ~93% of equities, while the socioeconomic and social systems continue towards failure. Progress! /s
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644650 (citations)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations)
U.S. workers' share of national income falls to a new low - https://www.axios.com/2026/08/06/ai-boom-labor-workers-incom... - August 6th, 2026
Most Americans don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44119317 - May 2025 (Report: https://www.lisep.org/mql)
the line WILL go up
> maybe the average person kind of sucks, or the way relationships are treated sucks
It's friction right? The last 150 years of progress have been all about removing friction.
And relationships are a great source of friction.
As a side note, I think it's this push for frictionlessness, this is the same force which has resulted in the loss of meaning.
Structure and community are seen as oppressive.
At last, we have been liberated from both.
My take is that capitalism has convinced a large number of people that any form of inconvenience is unacceptable.
This leads to people paying for services and products they don't need which leads to an atrophying of basic skills.
Off topic, but I have always wondered if the real advantage of an AI therapist is it has little power over you and will not snitch you to the authorities if you say something "wrong." People walk on eggshells when talking to human therapists because they know if they say something about hurting themselves or others, they can end up in a mental institution, losing their jobs, the custody of their children, their home, everything. AI companies seem to just not care enough to monitor the chats for these kind of things. For better or worse.
> will not snitch you to the authorities if you say something "wrong."
What makes you believe this? We had this story[1] just a few days ago where Waymo up and decided to pull over and hand passengers who had guns on them over to the police. If anything, I would trust AI less to keep a conversation private and not flag me for one of its many programmed "safety" triggers.
The local LLM running on my own hardware literally cannot snitch to anyone about anything.
Are you suggesting that a relevant fraction of people seeking AI therapy are doing so on their own hardware?
My $0.02 is when it comes to dating, social media ruined people’s “standards” [0]
People would rather chill and be single than date the wrong guy, even if they aren’t bringing much to the table themselves…
[0] - same energy as the teen girls have low self esteem due to magazine covers and instagram.
Also all the hot people can find each other now because of the dating apps and when people are below a certain level of ugliness they don’t want to date each other anymore.
Nah this is copium.
People who want to do stuff get off the apps. There are plenty of hot folks who never say yes who wind up on those apps for years.
Lots of uggos are also getting off the apps because they actually go on dates.
Personality matters a lot. Saying yes is very important. Everyone has a million excuses to say no.
There’s some truth to it. You can now easily meet people in a 100 mile radius, that wasn’t the case until about 20 years ago. Personality matters when people get to see it, not when you make snap decisions based on an image in half a second when you swipe.
I’ve been married for 15 years. When I found my wife even dating apps were much more slow paced, I just feel for the current generation.
This seems like an excuse/conspiracy theory. Hot people could always find hot people: go to where hot people hang out (clubs, hipster bars, art galleries, yoga, etc). What has definitely increased is access to people complaining about hot people not dating them.
If people are born into a situation or simply have had bad luck with who they decided to trust, after enough betrayal you decide that juice of relationships isn't worth the squeeze. I'm pretty much there in my life, I don't seek companionship in AI (nor can I ever imagine doing so) but more than casual friendships and especially romance is not worth the work or the pain.
Embrace the pain. It's a good stimulus to avoid stagnation and improve your situation.
Ah no. There's pain, and then there's pain that I would never wish on my worst enemy.
The pain I suffer gets worse with every setback and affects my work life for extended periods of time. Past a certain point you need to weigh the risks and tradeoffs, and in my calculus, for my own survival, it swung in favor of no relationships.
Everyone has a different strategy and I prescribe nothing, that is my own way
Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, hit the bricks, poor people should just buy more money, etc etc.
Life is hopeless, be more cynical, failure is inevitable, there's no point in trying, etc etc. Yawn.
Generalities like this dismiss the lived experience of other people.
You don't know the pain of others, especially what others hide from you.
I'd recommend checking out Sherry Turkle's work. It's not as much about availability as friction. Ai does not come with the friction IRL does, so people turn to it as an "easy mode"
I applaud the CCP for getting out in front of this one. It's way more a concern in my mind than data centers
> She is a specialist in how technology changes us psychologically and socially. Her new book is on our relationships with chatbots —Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. It will be published by Little, Brown and Company on September 29, 2026.
What good timing, thanks!
I first heard her on NPR during an Ai segment where they had a pilled CEO and Sherry (separately).
"What to do when Ai says 'I love you'"
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/g-s1177-78041/what-to-do-when...
A friend is in China right now.
I spent some time on the phone with him the other day, as he wandered around the city where he's working.
It was Sunday there, most people's day off, and he was amazed at how many people were out in the public parks, playing chess and go, kids on the playground equipment. inter-generational interaction.
His impression was that China has a much higher level of people randomly interacting with other's IRL than here in the US.
playing chess and go, kids on the playground
most of those people were likely a bit older, already retired, and were out watching their grandchildren. sunday there is no school or kindergarten.
Could be just China has a much higher population density. US cities sometimes feel like "ghost towns" in China to me...
I wonder how that looks per capita. I'd wager very similar between China and the US.
Looks like their cities are 10x bigger on average than US cities, that's amazing.
That means that if you go out for a walk you would be 10 times more likely to run into a friendly stranger who wants to chat.
this is exactly it. cities are bigger and denser. the higher population density means that you have to go out of your way to not run into someone or do something that is not common for chinese to do, like walking around in streets where there are no restaurants or shops.
Yes, Gov's require populations to have "real" offspring. Authoritarian or not, this makes sense. IMO its only a matter of time before some version of this hits the US; if it has not already.
Zero AI child policy
That will only be true until it occurs to them to tax robotic productivity. This whole issue feels like a temporary one.
“Robotic productivity” is taxed in every country, including China — the profits go to some entity, to some company. With exceptions for the companies that manage to wrestle themselves in paying virtually nothing in taxes, that profit is taxed somewhere down the line. Nothing special about AI productivity, it’s just money.
“Robotic productivity” is taxed in every country, including China
Only by taxing the humans and human-based corporations that ultimately pay for it. On a longer timeline, the robots are going to become full-fledged economic actors in their own right.
Maybe we can have the government provide token quotas as you have offspring.
Zero children = you (the parent) get zero tokens
One child = the parents get 18-years worth of tokens
Two children = the parents get 2 x 18-years worth of tokens
...
I mean that's pretty much the current welfare system.
We need more meat for the meat grinder. You will reproduce.
I wonder how this would effect products like Love and Deepspace. That gacha game is HUGE.
Knowing how big the meltdown it was, you would need to regulate parasocial interactions (of which AI partners are) in general too - beyond just regulating this (and gachas).
I legit thought the title was a linguistic euphemism targeted at dario and sama.
Is this "pacing the frontier"?
As a society, we do need to think about what "responsible ai" means and how we legislate for it without over regulating Ai outright
I hope the rest of the world follows suit. Can you imagine the human misery venture capital could inflict by pursuing this vertical?
Yes, it already exists and it's called dating apps
Dating apps are dead. Get with the times. It's 2026.
The CCP trying to get fertility rates up by cracking down on lesbians, paying money for children and now cracking down on whatever this is.
It's no use, though. You need a good economic and social outlook to get people to even consider having children. And this ain't it.
Indeed. Impoverished third world countries are known for having very low birthrates.
Given comparison reports between people's opinions of AI and the future between China and the US, I think it is.
Personally no amount of social outlook would want me want children. I simply don't want to have them I don't like raising or interacting with children it's just not in my nature and I really feel like a lot of that has to do with how people are nurtured.