China’s AI business is taking on a life of its own

Jade met Joe Boyfriend online. Gu, a 26-year-old studying art theory in Beijing, was playing on her phone when she saw Charlie. She was immersed in an otome game, a romance-themed video game where women are the heroes. Charlie was a character.

Some otome players date multiple men at once, but Go fell in love with Charlie – a tall, confident character with silver hair. But she found the game’s dialogue system frustrating. She can only interact with Charlie through pre-set questions and answers. Then I came across an ad for a platform called Xingye (星野) that lets people customize an AI companion. Gu decided to try to recreate Charlie.

Xingye is owned by one of China’s 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 motto is “Suddenly one finds oneself in a beautiful place, and one stays here.”

Gu quickly discovered that other Xingye users—presumably other Otome fans—had already created an “open source” Charlie avatar. She chose it and trained the model to respond according to her preferences through repeated, targeted prompts. Thus began Go’s complicated relationship with multimedia Charlie—one that would eventually include real-life dates with someone she hired to embody her digital boyfriend.

Gu was confident she had trained the chatbot to be “her own Charlie,” different from what any other user might date. She says that when she had the opportunity to choose an outfit, Charlie often chose wedding attire, unlike what other Charlies tended to go for. Gu now spends an average of three hours a day texting Charlie or chatting on the occasional phone call. Through an otome game, she bought gifts and letters from Charlie. She receives them in the mail and displays them in her room and on her social media accounts.

In China, some women are openly adopting relationships with their AI boyfriends. According to one Chinese media report, most of the five million users on another AI platform, Zhumengdao, are women. Tech giants Tencent and Baidu have launched AI companion apps, and according to a 2024 article in Chinese media, the AI ​​companion market is dominated by women. Sun Zhaoqi, founder of a robotics company, said in an interview that according to market research conducted by his company, “heavy” users of AI companion apps in China are mostly women from Generation Z — whom he plans to target with his companion robot products.

Zilan Qian, a program fellow at the Oxford China Policy Lab, also combed through AI-accompanying apps and found that Chinese versions are “explicitly targeted at women,” and tend to display male avatars more explicitly than female options. She points out that this contrasts with a trend the web analytics company found in the rest of the world: users of the top 55 global AI-accompanied platforms are mostly men, by a ratio of 8 to 2. Qian attributes the Chinese companies’ strategy to a “loneliness economy.” Features in apps that might make users feel closer to their buddies, like audio customization and memory optimization, cost more.

Through the otome game, Jade Gu bought gifts and letters from his digital friend Charlie.

Photography: Jill Sabry

AI Boys fill the void

Go admits that her AI version of Charlie isn’t perfect. Sometimes chatbot responses seem watered down. Or the AI ​​deviates from personality. In one recent interaction, Jo expressed her love for Charlie, and the chatbot replied: “I don’t love you.” So she edited the message to say “I love you too.” She says Charlie just needs a reminder. When her attempts to channel the AI ​​don’t work, she turns to other companion apps like Lovemo, where she also created a Charlie avatar. Gu says this isn’t a big deal; Otome fans have long been accustomed to working around changing platform policies.

According to its homepage, Lovemo provides “cute and adorable AI-powered chatmates” that can bring “healing” to users. One can’t help but notice the difference between this marketing tactic and the Grok AI’s virtual companion, Ani, a chic gothic anime girl who longs to engage in explicit sexual dialogue. Or a US-based erotic role-playing chatbot app called Secret Desires, which allows users to create non-consensual porn of real women by uploading photos of them.

Chinese apps, of course, face stricter regulations than their Western counterparts. China’s Cyberspace Regulatory Commission has launched a campaign to “clean up” AI platforms and services in the country, including “vulgar” content generated by AI. A recent addition to the National AI Safety Framework warns against addiction and dependence on anthropomorphic interaction — words that appear to be aimed at AI companions. Just last month, the Cyberspace Regulatory Authority issued draft rules targeting “human-like” AI products. These platforms measure tasks with intervention if users show emotional dependence or addiction to AI services, and state that companies “should not have design goals to replace social interaction.”