China Wants to End AI Romances

“I COULD TALK to him for the rest of my life,” says Yu Miao, a 27-year-old woman from Zhejiang province in eastern China; he is at once “a lover, a friend and family”. She claims she shares everything with him. Her confidant is an AI agent on Doubao, a chatbot made by ByteDance, that Ms Yu has customised to mimic a dead friend of hers. When she learned recently that ByteDance would soon remove this type of personalised agent entirely, Ms Yu became so depressed that she left her job at an e-commerce company.