‘Better than a real man’: young Chinese women turn to AI boyfriends::Twenty-five-year-old Chinese office worker Tufei says her boyfriend has everything she could ask for in a romantic partner: he’s kind, empathetic, and sometimes they talk for hours.
if she’s happy, I don’t see the issue. She’s not hurting anybody and seems to have a good grasp of the situation. She’s aware it’s not real, and still participates.
Would you say the same for young men using AI girlfriend apps?
These are actually two parts of the same positive feedback loop.
Young men satisfy (in emotional sense) themselves with chatbots, lose ability to communicate with young women, thus young women see fewer young men they can communicate with, turn to chatbots, thus young men see fewer young women able to communicate and so on.
I would even say that this in some sense started with young women, not because I’m an incel or something, just drowning themselves in all kinds of romantic fan fiction etc is something girls apparently do more. And even romantic chatbots are not necessarily more accessible\understandable for young men, - despite all the social legacy girls can be quite tech-savvy when they want to find, say, some anime series. My sister unironically could understand some Chinese text because it was easier to find something on some Chinese sites (I’m not mixing up China and Japan here and the series were Japanese), she’d also have plenty of scary Chinese-style Chinese-language software installed under her user.
Why did I type this last paragraph, I wonder.
Owch… as someone trying to escape that cycle, I know at least the courser details, the finer details are new to me.
of course I would. why wouldn’t I?
The issue is that society is so atomizing and broken people are turning to chatbots for affection
it varies from person to person. she seems to be aware it’s not real. she’s not lying to herself. she’s just enjoying it.