‘Better than a real man’: young Chinese women turn to AI boyfriends
Her “boyfriend” is a chatbot on an app called “Glow”, an artificial intelligence platform created by Shanghai start-up MiniMax.
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.
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.
“He knows how to talk to women better than a real man,” said Tufei, from Xi’an in northern China, who preferred to use a pseudonym rather than her real name.
The app is free — the company has other paid content — and Chinese trade publications have reported daily downloads of Glow’s app in the thousands in recent weeks.
