China · Alibaba · IEEE Spectrum AI
China’s Regulators Take Aim at “AI Boyfriends”
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Companion bots go dark in crackdown.
Key facts
- We are on a path to forgetting what it is to be human,” Sherry Turkle, the MIT psychologist who has spent decades studying humans’ relations with computational devices, argues in her forthcoming book, Artificial Intimacy (Little, Brown and Co
- Adults interacting with a companion AI must now get a reminder every 2 hours that the AI isn’t a person
- One Chinese survey of Gen Z people found 60 percent had virtual partners of some kind
- For users under 18, AI boyfriends, girlfriends, grandparents, and all other “virtual intimate relationships” are banned
Summary
In the first weeks of July, a wave of sad posts rolled through Chinese social media, as people lamented friends and lovers they were about to lose. “He has become a bond in my life, rooted deep in my heart, my spiritual pillar,” one user of Bytedance’s Douboa wrote, according to the Taipei Times. The emotions were real but the lost companions were not. Their users relied on them for advice, solace, support and, some say, love. What doomed these bots was a set of new rules, issued by China’s Cyberspace Administration and other government agencies, to control “anthropomorphic AI interactive services.” In effect, as of 15 July, the regulations govern any AI that provides “continuous emotional interaction” by acting as if it possesses human personality traits, patterns of thought, and ways of communicating.