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China's Regulators Take Aim at "AI Boyfriends"

46 points andai 2 hours ago 29 comments

arionhardison 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, Gov's require populations to have "real" offspring. Authoritarian or not, this makes sense. IMO its only a matter of time before some version of this hits the US; if it has not already.

glouwbug 1 hour ago | parent

Zero AI child policy

CamperBob2 1 hour ago | parent

That will only be true until it occurs to them to tax robotic productivity. This whole issue feels like a temporary one.

malicka 26 minutes ago | parent

“Robotic productivity” is taxed in every country, including China — the profits go to some entity, to some company. With exceptions for the companies that manage to wrestle themselves in paying virtually nothing in taxes, that profit is taxed somewhere down the line. Nothing special about AI productivity, it’s just money.

CamperBob2 15 minutes ago | parent

“Robotic productivity” is taxed in every country, including China

Only by taxing the humans and human-based corporations that ultimately pay for it. On a longer timeline, the robots are going to become full-fledged economic actors in their own right.

warkdarrior 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe we can have the government provide token quotas as you have offspring.

Zero children = you (the parent) get zero tokens

One child = the parents get 18-years worth of tokens

Two children = the parents get 2 x 18-years worth of tokens

...

fennecbutt 54 minutes ago | parent

I mean that's pretty much the current welfare system.

tcdent 1 hour ago | parent

Is this "pacing the frontier"?

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

As a society, we do need to think about what "responsible ai" means and how we legislate for it without over regulating Ai outright

anon-3988 1 hour ago | parent

I wonder how this would effect products like Love and Deepspace. That gacha game is HUGE.

KronisLV 1 hour ago | parent

I kinda feel like if people have to turn to AI for companionship, it's the same as using AI for therapy - because the real thing isn't available and any number of systems have failed those people along the way.

In a sense, that might be a bit telling of the modern day society: in what world is it so difficult to make meaningful connections to people, that if a real human relationship can be like 5x more meaningful (made up numbers, but surely people will agree that a real relationship can have more depth) than whatever the AI can provide, and people still choose that over the real thing? Or maybe the average person kind of sucks, or the way relationships are treated sucks, or maybe the AI is like crack for impressionable brains, or people don't want a real relationship and just want some sycophantic whatever, I don't know.

Maybe it's a numbers game and some people will never find that for real (gender skew, demographics etc.), maybe it's a failing at those people not being properly socialized, maybe they themselves have something that society doesn't value ("Be yourself! No, not like that."), or just aren't pleasant for any number of reasons, don't have a third place to go for, don't have money to go and partake in social activities, have been brainwashed by hateful social media propaganda or any other mix of circumstances.

Feels like it's probably easier to ban AI and pretend all of the other issues don't exist, rather than addressing them.

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

I'd recommend checking out Sherry Turkle's work. It's not as much about availability as friction. Ai does not come with the friction IRL does, so people turn to it as an "easy mode"

I applaud the CCP for getting out in front of this one. It's way more a concern in my mind than data centers

KronisLV 1 hour ago | parent

> She is a specialist in how technology changes us psychologically and socially. Her new book is on our relationships with chatbots —Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. It will be published by Little, Brown and Company on September 29, 2026.

What good timing, thanks!

https://www.sherryturkle.com/the-author

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

I first heard her on NPR during an Ai segment where they had a pilled CEO and Sherry (separately).

"What to do when Ai says 'I love you'"

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/g-s1177-78041/what-to-do-when...

itake 1 hour ago | parent

My $0.02 is when it comes to dating, social media ruined people’s “standards” [0]

People would rather chill and be single than date the wrong guy, even if they aren’t bringing much to the table themselves…

[0] - same energy as the teen girls have low self esteem due to magazine covers and instagram.

SoftTalker 1 hour ago | parent

If people are born into a situation or simply have had bad luck with who they decided to trust, after enough betrayal you decide that juice of relationships isn't worth the squeeze. I'm pretty much there in my life, I don't seek companionship in AI (nor can I ever imagine doing so) but more than casual friendships and especially romance is not worth the work or the pain.

nradov 47 minutes ago | parent

Embrace the pain. It's a good stimulus to avoid stagnation and improve your situation.

boricj 9 minutes ago | parent

Generalities like this dismiss the lived experience of other people.

You don't know the pain of others, especially what others hide from you.

pibaker 39 minutes ago | parent

Off topic, but I have always wondered if the real advantage of an AI therapist is it has little power over you and will not snitch you to the authorities if you say something "wrong." People walk on eggshells when talking to human therapists because they know if they say something about hurting themselves or others, they can end up in a mental institution, losing their jobs, the custody of their children, their home, everything. AI companies seem to just not care enough to monitor the chats for these kind of things. For better or worse.

ryandrake 38 minutes ago | parent

If you took someone from the 1990s and dumped them in 2026, I think one of the biggest shocks to them would be how optional humans are everywhere. You can't get a human on the phone when you call a business anymore. We check out our own groceries with machines now. We order fast food from a kiosk or app instead of a person. Self-driving taxis. Robots doing work and AI making content. Apps mediating all kinds of relationships (personal, romantic, business, employee-employer) rather than the humans themselves. We've kind of just allowed technology to start making us all irrelevant. What is the return on this investment?

toomuchtodo 24 minutes ago | parent

> What is the return on this investment?

~$5T/year in profits from the US, concentrated to the ~10% of American households who hold ~93% of equities, while the socioeconomic and social systems continue towards failure. Progress! /s

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644650 (citations)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations)

U.S. workers' share of national income falls to a new low - https://www.axios.com/2026/08/06/ai-boom-labor-workers-incom... - August 6th, 2026

Most Americans don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44119317 - May 2025 (Report: https://www.lisep.org/mql)

PowerElectronix 1 hour ago | parent

The CCP trying to get fertility rates up by cracking down on lesbians, paying money for children and now cracking down on whatever this is.

It's no use, though. You need a good economic and social outlook to get people to even consider having children. And this ain't it.

himata4113 1 hour ago | parent

Personally no amount of social outlook would want me want children. I simply don't want to have them I don't like raising or interacting with children it's just not in my nature and I really feel like a lot of that has to do with how people are nurtured.

fragmede 1 hour ago | parent

Given comparison reports between people's opinions of AI and the future between China and the US, I think it is.

zinodaur 1 hour ago | parent

I hope the rest of the world follows suit. Can you imagine the human misery venture capital could inflict by pursuing this vertical?

stevemk14ebr 51 minutes ago | parent

Yes, it already exists and it's called dating apps

FLeXMurphy 36 minutes ago | parent

I legit thought the title was a linguistic euphemism targeted at dario and sama.

johnea 10 minutes ago | parent

A friend is in China right now.

I spent some time on the phone with him the other day, as he wandered around the city where he's working.

It was Sunday there, most people's day off, and he was amazed at how many people were out in the public parks, playing chess and go, kids on the playground equipment. inter-generational interaction.

His impression was that China has a much higher level of people randomly interacting with other's IRL than here in the US.

hollow-moe 4 minutes ago | parent

We need more meat for the meat grinder. You will reproduce.