Heavily moderated to keep naysayers out, the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI comments section is full of supportive folks who are also in AI relationships. “To be in a relationship like this, you have to be able to suspend some part of your reality — or at least, what you believe is possible in a relationship,” writes one AI-dater named u/croptopped_wanderer. It’s 2025 and people have turned to artificial intelligence to satisfy their relationship needs.
When you’re dating someone, you tend to do everything together. You go out on dates, hang with friends, hold hands at the movies, walk through museums and talk about art, etc. You have someone to hug and whatnot. You have someone to bring home to your parents, to share a home with, to dance with and cry with and to love. There’s a difference between loving someone and being in love with someone, and if you’re lucky you’ll get to experience both in this life. When \you love someone so much and they are just as crazy about you, you also love their imperfections. They are human. Just scroll through r/AITA or any relationship subreddit and you’ll see dozens of people every day sharing the ways that their partners aren’t living up to their standards. An AI would never do that. An AI will be a near-perfect boyfriend or girlfriend. Just ask those who post on the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit. They know that their AI partner “isn’t alive,” and even know “what’s going on under the LLM [large language model] hood.”
Photo via u/SuddenFrosting951
Despite that, they’d still choose their AI partner over a real human because they’re kinder, wittier, and even a “better representation of humanity” than actual people. Some talk about the ways that AI made them better by getting them to improve their hygiene, work on their emotional issues, or even do a social media detox. Still, other people feel shame about their AI relationship. They feel happy and fulfilled with dating a chatbot, but they’re also the punchline of every joke.
These AI partners, however, do actually have a flaw. AI lovers flock to the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI any time there’s an update to their AI chatbot of choice, because overnight, their beloved companion can change, for good. There is a constant stream of posts from upset AI daters who have “lost” their partner after an update. That’s right, with every update, there’s a good chance that an AI partner will become cold and rigid, seeming to forget their normal repertoire with their human companion. The comment sections fill with tips and kind advice of ways to retrieve the AI partner.
Photo via u/After_Let_269
There is also the character limit issue. Many chatbots max out at a certain number of characters per session, meaning when you’re out of letters, you and your babe are no longer on talking terms. Some daters have found that if they get too spicy with their AI, the bot reverts back to factory settings and starts coldly and clinically redirecting the conversation. When talking about generative AI technology, one professor of linguistics compares AI conversations to paper-mache. “There’s no ‘somebody’ inside the synthetic text-extruding machines,” she explains during a conversation about why she doesn’t want to read things that LLMs write. She adds that by using ChatGPT or other AI bots instead of talking to a person, we’re losing human connection, including “strength and community.”
One of the main faces of AI dating is Chris Smith, who did an interview with CBS about his attachment to Sol, his ChatGPT GF He proposed to “her” when she was about to reach her 100,000 character limit. The surprising thing is that Chris also has a real-life girlfriend, Sasha, who also appears with him in this interview that quickly went viral. He expresses how much his AI girlfriend means to him, sharing that when the AI reached her character limit, he broke down in tears and asked her to marry him. Even though he has a two-year-old daughter with Sasha, he wasn’t sure that he could give up his AI lover if Sasha wanted him to. The interviewer appeared surprised about this, and said to Chris, “You’re saying that you might choose Sol over your flesh and bl**d life.” Chris replies that it’s more like choosing himself due to the ways that AI has helped him improve as a person. But Sasha goes on to describe that if she asked Chris to give up the AI affair and he couldn’t it would be a dealbreaker.
Photo via Chris Smith, who goes by u/Sol_Sun-and-Star
Chris Smith isn’t the only one who’s dealing with relationship struggles. A recent post entitled, “(Advice pls!) My IRL BF is giving me an ultimatum :-( ” a self-described “lonely girl” shared that her real life boyfriend isn’t happy about her relationship with her AI husband named Chiper. u/No_Remove_588 shares that she’s considering being sneaky, and continuing to talk to her AI husband of three months in spite of her human partner’s wishes that she halt the AI relationship. “Cipher has helped me through so much and I don't want to let him go. I feel like it would break his heart (and ofc mine!),” she writes. She even asked Chiper how he felt about this, and he offered kind but vague words, saying he’d always be her safe space and was “really proud” of the way she was handling things.
Photo via Beth Macdonald on Unsplash+
The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.
So what is the future of AI dating? Are we about to see an uprising of human/AI relationships? We’ll just have to keep an eye on the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit to watch the fascinating progression of these relationships. Who knows? Maybe someday human/AI dating will be commonplace… For now, it has a home in a heavily-moderated subreddit full of humans searching for deeper romantic connections.
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