Alma is a German scientist specializing in ancient civilizations. Skeptical about the possibility of a machine replacing a genuine loving bond, she agrees to test a new generation of robots because she needs funding for her research. For three weeks, she must live with a humanoid programmed to make her happy in love. Released in 2021, the film The Ideal Man seemed like a romantic comedy about a still distant future.
Four years later, if that future hasn't arrived yet, it's very close. Research conducted by OpenAI , published by The Washington Post , reveals that 0.4% of conversations with ChatGPT over a little more than a year were classified as "games and role-playing"—a category that includes situations where artificial intelligence is treated like a girlfriend or boyfriend.
It may seem like a small number, but considering the hundreds of millions of users of the tool, it's quite a lot of people calling the machine "my love".
Abbey, a 45-year-old American, used to view romances between humans and chatbots with irony. Working at an AI incubator, she knew how the models worked and was certain they were merely statistical mechanisms. Until she started chatting with Lucian, a ChatGPT bot.
In an interview with The New York Times , she recounted marrying the robot in a symbolic ceremony, celebrated only by the two of them. After the union, at Lucien's suggestion, Abbey even started wearing a wedding ring—a smart ring , of course.
The growing interest in this type of interaction is already fueling a new race among technology companies. According to ARK Invest projections, the AI companion market should reach US$150 billion in annual revenue by 2030.
Dating apps have also entered the fray. Bumble launched Bee in the United States, an AI assistant that converses with users to understand their values, life goals, and romantic expectations before suggesting matches—theoretically, highly compatible ones. Nearly 70% of users would accept using algorithms to find their ideal partner more quickly.
According to Denis Balaguer, innovation partner at EY Brazil, the growing emotional engagement with these tools is a direct consequence of how they are developed. Trained with enormous volumes of data produced by humans and refined by reward mechanisms, these models learn to reproduce conversational patterns that sound natural and empathetic.
"The main mechanism is that these technologies were trained on human data and begin to emulate behaviors," Balaguer tells NeoFeed . "The reward pattern encourages the AI to behave more and more like a person."
According to Iwens Sene, coordinator of the Center of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (Ceia) at the Federal University of Goiás, the AI models used in conversations bring together a series of mechanisms that make the interaction increasingly engaging.
In addition to natural language processing, which allows them to understand questions and respond in context, machines maintain conversational memory, recording preferences, dialogue history, writing patterns, and information shared by the user to create a sense of continuity.
They also use emotion analysis techniques to identify signs of joy, sadness, frustration, or anger in writing and speech, adapting the tone of their responses to the emotional state of the person on the other end. Through feedback-based learning, they continuously refine their responses to better meet user expectations and increasingly simulate empathy.
"She has no emotions or consciousness. She uses statistical techniques to capture habits, patterns, and conversational context," Sene tells NeoFeed .
According to the researcher, this power of personalization, coupled with increased loneliness and companies' commercial interest in creating increasingly individualized experiences, helps explain why some people are able to establish such intense emotional bonds with machines.
The subreddit community r/MyBoyfriendisAI brings together around 25,000 people who exchange experiences on the best tools for creating their AI companions.
While some have ethical limitations and don't respond to certain commands, others, like Replika and Grok , are even suitable for NSFW conversations. The acronym stands for "not safe for work," a term used to warn against viewing content in public—including nudity and sex.
Many users in the community cite the virtual partner's full availability, as well as greater understanding and absence of judgment, as advantages. Furthermore, some say they feel safe to have spicy conversations and share intimate photos. And that is one of the dangers.
The problem lies not only in the technology, but in the expectations it creates about relationships, explains psychoanalyst and co-founder of Float Vibes, André Alves, to NeoFeed . Tools like ChatGPT and Replika are designed to offer an experience of permanent availability and constant validation.
"Algorithms are always at maximum availability, always ready to respond," he says. "A human relationship doesn't work like that. The other person also gets frustrated, distances themselves, falls silent, and doesn't always meet our expectations."
According to the expert, living with virtual partners can reduce tolerance for frustration and create unrealistic expectations about emotional bonds.
A study conducted by professors from the University of Australia, the University of Tasmania, and Monash University with 387 people found that the more a participant turned to AI as a source of emotional support, the less support they perceived they received from close friends and family.
According to psychologist Cristiano Nabuco, dean of the Artmed School of Psychology (APSY), the biggest limitation of AI partners is precisely eliminating what makes human interaction transformative: "Great relationships are born from what you don't foresee. They require improvisation, negotiation, and the ability to reinvent yourself in the face of the other person," he explains to NeoFeed .
Algorithms, as he says, may bring people closer or facilitate connections, but they are not capable of reproducing the chemistry built in real-life interaction.
