Better than a real man': young Chinese women turn to AI boyfriends
Ludovic Ehret and Qian Ye
Tue, 13 February 2024 at 11:47 am SGT
Wang Xiuting talks to her virtual boyfriend on Wantalk - an artificial intelligence chatbot created by Chinese tech company Baidu, on her phone at a cafe in Beijing (Jade GAO)More
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.
Except he isn't real.
Her "boyfriend" is a chatbot on an app called "Glow", an artificial intelligence platform created by Shanghai start-up MiniMax that is part of a blossoming industry in China offering friendly -- even romantic -- human-robot relations.