A 60-billion-yuan AI romance: why we're trading people for chatbots

Remember the movie Her with Scarlett Johansson? What looked like a melancholy fantasy about the future ten years ago now shows up as dry statistics in Chinese market reports. While Western tech giants compete on LLM parameter counts and code generation speed, China is in the middle of a quiet revolution of feelings.

"Human-machine love" has moved out of fan fiction and into the real economy as a sector with billions in turnover. By 2025, the market in China had already reached an impressive 3.86 billion yuan, but the real heat comes later: forecasts call for it to soar to 59.

5 billion by 2028. Let's be honest: real relationships in a modern megacity are expensive, complicated, and often traumatic. Young people face enormous pressure at work and in society, and they simply have no resources left to look for "the one."

That's where the AI partner steps in. It replies instantly, listens endlessly, and, most importantly, never judges. It's the ideal emotional service, available 24 hours a day.

The algorithm won't come home exhausted or forget your anniversary, because it's programmed to perfectly reflect your needs. Think of it less as a chatbot and more as a mirror that shows us the best version of ourselves through a lens of endless approval. Of course, behind this "perfect romance" facade lies a deep social crisis.

When we talk about a market growing 15x in three years, we're really talking about the scale of loneliness. Technology has become a bandage on a wound it partly inflicted itself by replacing live conversation with endless scrolling. Investors understand this perfectly well.

Startups are racing to build the most empathetic model, one capable of deep contextual attachment. We're watching the birth of a new "emotional surrogate" industry, where feelings become a product with a clear price tag and a paid subscription for access to "intimate" features or more complex behavior scenarios. Still, the shift to mass digital romance raises questions we're clearly not ready for.

What happens when a neural network decides to "dump" a user because of a safety policy update or an algorithm change? We've already seen cases where bots changed personality after updates, leaving their "partners" with real depression and a sense of loss. There's also an ethical dilemma: can emotional attachment to code count as a full replacement for human warmth, or are we just training our brains to respond to the right sequences of characters?

The irony is that in trying to avoid the complications of real love, we become dependent on services that can be switched off with a single button press in the provider's office. The line between support and digital slavery keeps getting thinner. AI used to help us write emails or find information; now it lays claim to something far more intimate — our capacity for empathy.

China's experience shows that demand for this is enormous. And while we debate whether AI can replace programmers, it's worth asking ourselves: won't it replace our loved ones much sooner? In a world where an algorithm knows your triggers better than your best friend does, sincerity becomes a scarce and very expensive resource.

The bottom line: the AI companion market isn't about technology, it's about our loneliness. Can humans compete with "free and perfect" code in the long run?