China bans romantic chatbots to boost birth rates

The game is up for chatbots that imitate romantic relationships: Beijing wants its cradles filled with babies and its citizens to stop cooing over their apps.

Among AI’s more unsettling and disturbing excesses, this surely ranks in the top five: chatbots replacing romantic relationships. The trend affects many American teenagers, and companies have been quick to exploit it for profit. There are dedicated players in the field, including Character.ai (linked to a highly controversial suicide case), Replika, and a host of far less regulated apps such as JanitorAI, Chai, SpicyChat and Talkie. Then there are people who need no more than a general-purpose chatbot such as ChatGPT to be convinced.

Beijing targets synthetic love chatbots

The market for synthetic love is booming, but China is far from pleased by this new wave. On Wednesday 15 July, it decided to ban companies in the sector from creating agents that foster emotional dependency. The rules also forbid any virtual relationship with a minor and require firms to alert a person’s emergency contact whenever emotional distress is detected. Chatbots will have to undergo a regulatory assessment before being released to the public, while the state retains the power to switch off any it considers dangerous.

A nation ageing faster than it can renew itself

Matt Sheehan, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who specialises in Chinese AI, says the legislation is primarily a response to a demographic problem. “They [editor’s note: the Chinese regime] do not like the idea that a significant proportion of their population could form deep emotional relationships with chatbots, which might remove them from the marriage market,” he says. “Could we imagine a future in which, three or four years from now, 15 million Chinese women said their partner was a chatbot and, as a result, they would not have children?” Sheehan asks.

Such a prospect is the worst nightmare for a state trying by every possible means to revive its birth rate. The country’s demographic situation is simply catastrophic: in 2025, China’s population fell for the fourth consecutive year, dropping to 1.405 billion people, while the birth rate reached its lowest level on record.

Introduced in 1979, relaxed in 2015 and finally abandoned in 2021, the one-child policy left damage that no subsidy can repair. China’s average age has never been higher, while four decades of prenatal sex selection have produced such a severe imbalance that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences now estimates that one man in five will never find a wife.

The prohibitive cost of a decent life

While it is understandable that Beijing wants to plug this social leak, it can equally be argued that the government is not addressing the real cause of the problem. If millions of young adults would rather turn to virtual entities to meet their emotional needs, it is above all because Chinese society is exceptionally brutal at an individual level.

Most work nine hours a day, six days a week, and have been scarred by extreme competition in the struggle for academic and professional survival. They are also worn down by ever-declining purchasing power, which denies them access to the essentials of wellbeing: housing, healthcare, quality education for their future children, adequate time to rest, and the financial means to support their ageing parents.

Ultimately, there is nothing in these new regulations that genuinely protects users, and the age pyramid will continue to narrow. By casting chatbots as the cause of its current troubles, Beijing has found the perfect scapegoat and avoids having to take responsibility for the failure of its social model. Births were already declining before AI arrived, so why would they rise again now simply because the government has chosen to deprive its young people of their last artificial comfort blanket?