233
China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns
(www.dexerto.com)
Black market GFs that shit is going to be unhinged.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
233 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
43268 readers
197 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
That sucks. Everybody should be able to find happiness. Not everyone has the looks, wealth, opportunity, or charisma to find a human lover.
It's definitely not healthy, but this isn't going to fix the birth rate.
Correlation <> causation meme
This probably won’t fix anything, but hopefully stops it from contributing to the issue further down the line
…meme
It’s clearly not a healthy thing to exist.
It is the worst of para social relationships, amped up by 100x. And is only going to get more exploitative.
But just on a level of building up the skills to have a relationship, it’s training kids to expect someone who always says yes, always affirms them, will never challenge them to grow…
Relationships are hard. You have to learn to love people and how to do that, and you have to learn to not be selfish, which is the opposite of what LLMs tend to encourage.
Most importantly, you have to love imperfect people. And confront that you are imperfect as well. And thats ok!
Make babies! It's illegal to be lonely!
And wasn't China very recently concerned about their birthrate being too high? One Child Policy?
Now they're already concerned about their birth rate being too low?
The one-child policy was abolished in 2015, but birth rates have continued to decline after that. They currently have one of the world's lowest fertility rates.
Well yes, but also no. I think it was only really heavily policed in the 70s and early 80s then was lifted so regional and rural could have a second child (wiki says by '84 the single child policy only impacted 35% of the population). Still goes to show by forcibly dropping birthrates how much it destroys future planning
It's crazy, like overpopulation, stress, and pollution mean people don't want kids or something.
load more comments
(17 replies)
That will fix it.
AI girl/boyfriends are fucking addictions latching onto people vulnerbilities.
This ban is nothing but good, but no one thing will fix child birth rates, nor the reason for the addiction in the first place, I'll agree with that.
It is funny to me that china can pretend not to be a capitalist nation while displaying every symptom of capitalism.
load more comments
(6 replies)
You know what else fixes the birth rate? Making life less shitty and giving people enough money to be able to raise children.
In the meantime, negative birth rate is just self-correction of asshole dictatorships. Can't make money line go up if birth line go down.
Sperm counts are tanking worldwide while PFAS chems are being legalized and clean energy projects are shut down in favor of fossil fuels. Nature doesn't gaf, and will correct the unhealthy scenario. Humans are not the fittest if they destroy their own species by toxifying the environment. There's only so much we can do with a sperm count of zero. Even in a handmaid's tale scenario, a multiple of zero is zero.
I kind of think everywhere probably should, that's probably the strangest thing it's like falling in love with a microwave.
Good.
this will just spin up a blackmarket waifu market
At least if more people ended up doing this on their own hardware with open source software, it would cut off a lot of the opportunities it presents for companies to abuse people's privacy and manipulate them.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
There's a lot of problems with this, and declining birth rates of the most invasive species on Earth isn't one of them.
Bro think about Chinese economy please. Economy needs to survive bro..... Let go of your imaginery girl bro..... Treating your actual girlfriend like human is not mandatory bro...... Do it for patriotism bro....
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›