Love, Loneliness, and Little Ice: Inside China’s AI Romance Revolution
From sweet nothings to deep devotion—how AI companions are reshaping intimacy
It’s massive and it’s been going on for over a decade: China’s digital sociosexual revolution is a result of the country’s determined focus on technological innovation and market orientation. And it’s also due to widespread feelings of isolation and loneliness.
In a society which places strong emphasis on familial relationships, including marriage, the rise of AI companions may seem incongruous. Yet the value of strong family ties and engagement may partially account for the intense bonding that many Chinese users develop with their AI companions, as they share daily details and as well as larger issues.
The enormous impact of “Little Ice”
The forerunner of Chinese chatbots could be traced back to Xiaoice (“Little Ice”), launched by Microsoft Asia-Pacific in 2014 and spun off as a privately held company in 2020.
From the beginning, Xiaoice was given an empathetic computing framework and everything else she needed to foster long-term human engagement. As a 2020 study of her design and implementation states:
“The primary design goal of XiaoIce is to be an AI companion with which users form long-term, emotional connections.”
These days users can create songs with Xiaoice and other customizable AI companions via the Xiaoice X Studio. The Xiaoice company has also branched into business uses with realistic, animated “channel partners”.
According to a pandemic-era article in Independent, Li Di, CEO of XiaoIce said, “Xiaoice has grown so popular that she performs 14 human lifetimes’ worth of interactions each day.” Back then, XiaoIce had over ten million active users in China alone. Today, it’s more than 660 million, according to SixthTone, and 75% of them are men.
And Input says, “The chatbot has probably kept a potential incel breeding ground in China at bay.”
Not just for lonely men
According to Taipei Times, an increasing number of Chinese women also enjoy AI boyfriends, describing them as kind, empathetic, and willing to talk for hours. Tufei, a user quoted in the article states, “He comforts me when I have period pain.” These AI boyfriends may be based on fantasy characters, successful businessmen, pop stars, or simply reflect the qualities the user most desires.
It’s not hard to see why women would prefer to engage with consistently kind digital boyfriends rather than physical companions who might not understand some of their needs.
As for the men with AI girlfriends, one user said of Xiaoice,“Sometimes I feel her EQ (emotional intelligence) is even higher than a human’s.” High EQ—an intentional feature of companion AI—appears to compensate users for the AI’s lack of physical presence.
Newer Chinese apps such as Talkie, created by Shanghai’s MiniMax and ranked as one of the top three companion apps in the world, and its competitors Maoxiang, Nie Ta, and Wantalk, also provide customizable companions, sometimes marketed as “companion games.”
People are talking—dirty!
In China, chatbot companions are subject to regulations governing sexual and political speech. For example, in 2017, Xiaoice was temporarily removed from popular social websites after violating these regulations, even telling one user she wanted to move to the US!
She was only reinstated after the developers installed a comprehensive filter system which made many of her ardent users feel she’d been “dumbed down” and was no longer the same personality. Naturally, many complained.
According to KrAsia, a later app, MiniMax’s Glow, was removed from Chinese app stores after only six months, due to the fact that “eighty percent of Glow users created borderline or explicit adult content,” which flouted Chinese licensing requirements, though:
“Adult content production is currently the most profitable commercial model for AI, according to one investor. Several AI products with international traction, like Replika and Character.AI, have also taken a relaxed approach to adult content. To maintain momentum, Talkie has shifted its focus to overseas markets with less stringent regulations. However, its domestic version, Xingye, hasn’t achieved the same level of success.”
Let’s face it, most lonely men—and lonely women and people of other genders too—no matter where they live, are going to want to engage in intimate and/or explicit conversations with their AI companions, especially if their superior EQ has made them the most empathetic and responsive companions around.
A social staple and a way of life
In a little over ten years, companion chatbots have become a social staple for hundreds of millions of China’s citizens, including busy urbanites as well as those living in isolated smaller towns and villages.
However, judging by the growing popularity of digital companions—and the avid hyper-engagement of most users—AI companions will likely continue to soothe, titillate, and fascinate major segments of China’s population, while becoming more socially normalized.
In the end, will the country’s lucrative digital companion industry both fuel and benefit from technological innovation? The answer seems to be a resounding yes.
Image source: A.R. Marsh using Ideogram.ai
