“Better Than Real Man”: Chinese Women Turn To AI Boyfriends

Twenty-five-year-old Chinese office worker Tufei says her boyfriend has everything she could ask for in a romantic partner: he's kind, empathetic, and sometimes they talk for hours. Except he isn't real.

Her "boyfriend" is a chatbot on an app called "Glow", an artificial intelligence platform created by Shanghai start-up MiniMax that is part of a blossoming industry in China offering friendly -- even romantic -- human-robot relations.

"He knows how to talk to women better than a real man," said Tufei, from Xi'an in northern China, who declined to give her full name.