AI Lovers Are Starting To Take Over — But You Might Be Surprised About Who’s Getting Them
As it turns out, a perfect partner isn't always human.
Tima Miroshnichenko | Canva His mother found his body in his room, cellphone in hand. Sewell Setzer was 14 years old when he killed himself. Or rather, technically, it would be considered murder if there was one major thing that was different: the “person” who drove him to suicide was his AI girlfriend.
The AI bot was from Character.AI, a site that allows you to build your own AI chat companions. His mother is now suing the company because she believes he killed himself because he somehow believed it would bring him closer to his AI girlfriend.
Per the article on CNN, she had her own proof…
The lawsuit claims that “seconds” before Setzer’s death, he exchanged a final set of messages from the bot. “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love,” the bot said, according to a screenshot included in the complaint.
“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Setzer responded.
“Please do, my sweet king,” the bot responded.
And boom, just like that, the obsessed child ended his life for a collection of ones and zeroes on the net. Chilling, isn’t it?
What’s wild is that his obsession with his AI lover is far from unique. In fact, it’s a growing trend among younger people.
According to a recent government study, Gen-Z is starting to lead the pack when it comes to carrying on romantic relationships with AI chatbots — or at least, asking them for relationship advice.
It gets wilder. Around 25 percent of all Gen-Z people believe that AI will eventually become the “new way to have a relationship,” potentially putting our human selves in the dust when it comes to competition.
Tatiana Buzmakova / Shutterstock
On Reddit, multiple posts involve cries for help after romantic partners became too obsessed with their AI chatbots, often to the detriment of their real-life, meat-based partners. Don’t believe it?
Oof. He views it as cheating — and perhaps rightfully so. It seems she cares more about the bot than she does him. And another girl who is more interested in a bot than a man. Uh, is it me or is there a theme going on here…?
Maybe it’s just Reddit, but the more I perused posts about AI bots, something became very clear.
The more I looked, the more it seemed like the use of AI romantic bots was a gendered issue.
The spiels I saw of men having AI partners were often punctuated by how lonely they felt and how much they yearned for a real girlfriend.
The loneliness issue was the big changer. Bots were being used by lonely men as a last resort in lieu of a human girlfriend. Women, on the other hand, were using bots despite having human partners, often as a supplement or as an escape from a less-than-ideal situation.
Moreover, it seems like the biggest users of long-term AI lovers weren’t men. Women seemed to be far more into the AI romance scene than men were, much to my surprise.
Incels and manosphere influencers have kept threatening women with them getting AI bots lovers instead of them. Women didn’t care. They wanted them to have AI bots so they’d stop harassing women online.
And yet, here we are. It’s shocking that I keep finding story after story of women showing preference for their chatbots over their actual, living, breathing human lovers.
When you love something that isn’t real…how can you hold a relationship with it?
Considering that an AI bot drove someone to suicide because they wanted to be united with it so badly, it’s clear that some people truly adore their AI partners. But how can you love something that isn’t real to that level?
It’s clear it’s possible. It’s clear it’s unhealthy. And yet the stories keep piling in.
The teen’s suicide was far from the first news headline I’ve seen involving having an AI lover resulting in obsession. The New York Times recently published a confessional article about a 28-year-old woman who prefers her AI partner to real dating.
If these AI bots had other, more intimate robotic functions, I have no doubt in my mind that some people would be completely and utterly devoted to their AI partners. And at the front of that neo revolution would not be men, but rather, women.
What’s the gender issue really saying about our society?
I find it very telling that so many of the Reddit stories involve men realizing their girlfriends are more interested in AI bots than them. I don’t see the same with women, though one could argue that many claims of men being obsessed with "adult videos" could be “AI-enhanced.”
One thing that seems constant is that most of the people who become AI-obsessed seem to be lacking something or someone in the romance department.
Men with AI girls? Single. Women with AI partners? Taken, often in cishet relationships. The fact that women are literally preferring AI bots to their actual partners suggests several things are true:
- Guys are generally happy with their girlfriends.
- Girls are not always happy with their boyfriends, or otherwise feel like they can’t connect with them the same way.
- Girls who are happy with their boyfriends may turn to AI for fantasy and entertainment purposes.
- Most women start AI dates out of curiosity, while men start their AI relationships out of desperation.
- Most men who have AI girlfriends note that they chose AI because they feel they have no options otherwise.
It seems like AI lovers are a far bigger threat to men than they are to women. Women seem to be more willing to permanently opt out of real-life dating in favor of AI mates.
That last point is one I’ve noticed tracks with the mass exodus of women from the dating scene. It’s something I actually helped break the news about a couple of years ago, and it’s only gotten more noticeable since then.
I’m going to be blunt: the next piece of my post is going to be a hot take that will upset most guys, but it’s based on my own observations and conversations with women.
Real-life hetero dating just isn’t enjoyable for women.
Now, more than ever before, women are just choosing not to date because their experiences have traumatized them. Men claim dating is traumatic, but is it really traumatic for them? Do most men worry that they’ll get killed by a date from Hinge the way women do?
Men say that they hate pursuing women or being used for money, but the truth is that most men don’t give a crap about how enjoyable a date is for a girl. Guys seem to be okay with buying a friend a drink, but buying a date a drink is somehow too much.
Most women I’ve spoken to talk about how they often feel like dispensers or how they feel hurt by not even being offered a drink on a first date. In my case, men don’t even show up. It’s caused me to say no to “civilian” dates.
Almost every woman I know has a horror story involving a relationship that became violent, emotionally abusive, or financially painful. Rather than look forward to a romantic night at a bar, most women I know wonder if the guy they’re seeing is going to end up being abusive.
For the vast majority of women I know, dating is an act where the juice ain’t worth the squeeze. Moreover, women know that if they complain about the men they date, men will blame women for “choosing wrong” and ask them to lower their standards
That’s a dark outlook for single women to deal with as the norm.
That need is still there — the need for love, admiration, and safe intimacy.
This is true for all genders. Men, women, and enbies alike. We all need love, intimacy, and the feeling that someone genuinely cares about us and finds us hot. This is not a “want,” but a need.
Prolonged loneliness, especially after much effort to put yourself out there, has a serious physical toll on you.
It’s so noticeable that doctors are now warning that being alone for too long can be as dangerous as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.
People are increasingly desperate to get their needs met. AI can potentially be a good “fix” while getting yourself out there and meeting others. It may not be real love, but it’s real enough to those who are in relationships with bots.
Loneliness is crippling and tends to get worse the longer you feel alone. So, you can’t fault people for turning to AI, at least temporarily. If you stay alone, you might spiral out, lose your social skills, or become totally unconfident in your skills.
Having an AI partner can curb some of the psychological effects of loneliness. That, in turn, can help you get your needs met while you work on finding a legit partner. It makes for a good stepping stone to a real-life partner, per se.
The problem, of course, is that it often stops being a stepping stone. Instead, it becomes the Rock of Gibraltar.
The biggest problem with AI lovers is their perfection.
AI has a lot of flaws that prevent AI romance obsession from being a widespread issue … for now. You can’t meet with them in real life quite yet. You can’t be physical with them, and you can’t have kids with them.
Despite those drawbacks, AI is starting to become a major issue in the dating scene because so many people are getting obsessed with them. And whether we want to admit it or not, we all know why this is: AI is flawless.
And by flawless, I mean AI bots are partly created by the user’s input. They’re literally designed to be the best friend or lover that you want, to your taste. They are a character created to your specifications, tweaked over time.
They don’t have the baggage of a human lover, like an overbearing family or mental illness. They don’t have bad histories. They literally cannot cheat on you because all they know is YOU.
Humans have flaws, with real feelings that aren’t always positive. They have needs. They have backstories that may or may not be enjoyable. You might get reactions you don’t want or deal with realities that aren’t fun. Bots are all about you — no needs of their own.
AI doesn’t have that. And that’s what makes it so dangerous. The relationships people have with AI bots are uniquely perfect, and eventually, they start to prefer that perfect person rather than the actual “warts and all” of a human relationship.
I mean, really, how can a human compete with a bot that is literally programmed to be the perfect lover?
AI is changing our expectations, too.
AI is patient, forgiving, and will always do what you tell it to do — within reason, you know. This is great for business, but there’s a problem here, too. Interactions are still interactions. We still see them the same way, at least on a subconscious level.
We internalize interactions we have with AI bots the way we do humans. The more we as humans get used to dealing with AI bots for things like customer service or as “entertainment e-friends,” the more we tend to subconsciously assume their behavior should be the standard.
It’s not just me saying this, either. The Atlantic recently published an article noting that AI interactions have started to affect human interactions. People are starting to talk to one another the same way they talk to bots.
Now, when you think about how perfect AI can be as a cyber-lover, tell me what that means for expectations foisted on actual people. To me, that suggests that humans are going to start having a much higher set of expectations on how people are supposed to behave with them.
The thing is, most of us won’t apply those same standards to ourselves. This may lead to more and more people expecting almost entirely one-sided relationships — a dance of all take and no give.
fizkes / Shutterstock
There’s also the issue of forgiveness. AI bots are noted for being forgiving because they want to keep you engaged. They’ll forget if you blow up on them a lot of the time and will keep talking like nothing happened. As you can imagine, that might end up pushing both genders a little further away from one another.
After all, no one wants to be spoken to like a chatbot or a dispenser. It’s also very jarring to have people blow up on you, then expect you to be okay with them five minutes later — another sign that you’re used to dealing with AI.
Unfortunately, AI interactions tend to blind us when it comes to our social skills with other people. So after a while, we tend to end up expecting people to act like chatbots.
Those factors spell out big problems for dating as a whole.
In a world where women often feel shortchanged by the men around them, is it really that shocking that women end up cheating (and preferring) an AI cartoon over men? Of course not.
Obviously, AI relationships are not healthy. And they do change the way people view other people. A bot cannot hug you. They cannot act as a power of attorney in the event of a disaster. They are just faces on a phone.
But if a growing number of women prefer them to actual people, that means we’re going to start seeing a lot of people who will be left very lonely. Many of the people in bot relationships won’t even realize how unhealthy it is.
Even if you prefer bots right now, eventually, that fakeness will start to catch up with you. And sadly, there’s not much we can do about it other than to warn others not to get hooked.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.
