The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends — Boys as young as 12 are now in romantic ‘relationships’ with chatbots, and it’s affecting how they treat girls in the real world
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/25/schoolboys-ai-girlfriends/
48 Comments
This is a problem in so many ways. This generation is going to be irreparably harmed if AI is allowed to continue to soak into daily life.
I am concerned a boy with an AI girlfriend will find it hard to deal with a real person as a GF. Could be bad for development.
Well surely we should blame the kids for this and not do anything at all to regulate the AI companies or their billionaire owners!
Again, just like with iPads, stop putting the blame solely on the kids. What the actual fuck are these parents doing (or not doing) that these kinds of problems reach the point they do?
And I’m sure the excuses will come pouring in, but at the end of the day if you are a parent you are wholly responsible for your child. If you can’t regulate their online activity, maybe it’s time to look inwards and accept the problem could be you not being able to say no to your kid.
“But everyone at school has a brand new iPhone, I NEED one. But Mom this AI app is the only way to be cool, I NEED to have it. Wahhh I’ll cry and scream if I don’t get it until you do give it to me, just like how I was raised.”
Women are much more involved romantically with AI. Another misandric piece by the mainstream media. You can see the members of “MyBoyfriendIsAI” and “MyGirlfriendIsAI” here on reddit and compare the two.
A world created by narcissistic sociopaths finds ways to turn people into narcissistic sociopaths.
Why are we blaming kids for being dumb kids and not blaming the adults who caused this to happen?
The development of children in the last ten years has been pretty thoroughly fucked already. Of course it’s just getting worse. Shocking. Humanity is basically just destroying its future at this point. I’ve just been slowly watching this train wreck for more than ten years. It’s so tiring.
On one hand, their downward spiral will have dire consequences for society. On the other hand, children parented this badly and this developmentally behind are best removed from the dating pool, for women’s sake.
I don’t care what the internet says, kids that young shouldn’t even be able to use AI chatbots for this whole scenario to even be a possibility…
Okay I’m going to say this. I don’t think this is a significant rise and this is more of a slippery slope argument then a evidence based research
Boys resort to sad behaviour. Girls most affected.
Where are the parents? Jesus Christ.
Lack of media literacy here makes one wonder if the first doomed generation hasn’t already happened?
Ok, and so what? What are you going to do about it?
Funny, I thought children under 13 couldn’t be online, and allowed to “date” a product at that. Where are the COPPA fines????
Do what we did back in the day and play Japanese dating sims ya dorks
Other articles describe AI relationships as rising in popularity among girls/women, likely to the same results (affecting behavior towards real boys/men).
Lonely people have been turning to virtual partners ever since virtual partners started being possible.
Howdy,
Sadly this is the bad influence of media on us, which also impacts the decision of those who gather the information, regardless of age and regardless if the parents give their best or not.
If our (upcoming) daughters and sons use obscene language, violence, alcohol-abuse, this can be also glorified by media, media has many ways to reach out to people.
Kind regards,
Lahdo
Those lads need education!
https://youtu.be/JPQJBgWwg3o?si=zcU3BJvahVEm95vc
This is a parenting problem not a technology problem.
DON’T DATE ROBOTS.
Women don’t want men anymore anyway
Yeah, man, all these MEN are messing everything up, isn’t that right Bumble CEO?
[Oh.](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/ai-personas-are-future-dating-bumble-founder-says-many-arent-buying-rcna151738)
My generation mostly survived porn addictions. I imagine the kids will be mostly fine once they grow up?
Let that frontal lobe catch up a bit.
“They encourage users to buy their ‘partner’ virtual gifts – roses, jewellery, virtual boxes of chocolate – which only exist in the app…Ultimately, they’re monetising human loneliness and reinforcing human loneliness to make more money.”
Lol. What can you even say? This shit just straight up should not exist. I can not think of a single way in which this benefits society. Burn it all down.
One day a woman will carry a surrogate child for an AI chat bot.
The article states that only 20% of teenagers “know of” a boy in a romantic relationship with a chatbot. 80% of teenage boys do not know of anybody in a romantic relationship with a chatbot. And if there was ANYBODY in school in a relationship with an ai chatbot, everybody would know about it! teenagers gossip! This article is about nothing.
We are essentially letting tech companies run a massive, unregulated psychological experiment on an entire generation of children. These platforms use aggressive retention algorithms and psychological hooks designed to foster unhealthy parasocial attachments because it keeps engagement high.
There absolutely need to be stricter age verification and guardrails. Just like social media before it, by the time we have the long-term data on the psychological damage this is causing to young boys’ development, the damage will already be done.
I am so glad I didn’t have kids. The future is so screwed.
Why’s it calling out males specifically? I’m sure all genders participate in such anti-social behaviour.
Pretty sure there was a futurama episode about this.
Shitty parenting again
Bot posting about what a bot wrote. I wonder how many comment leavers have a one month or less post history.
They should see what happened to Phillip j. Fry when he had a robot girlfriend
This is certainly not just with boys, any time I use incognito to watch on YouTube without ad tracking I get ads for those gross ai role play apps and they’re almost always ads clearly targeting teen girls, it’s disturbing to say the least
I would rather take a more empathetic look at ‘why’ these boys think it is easier to make an AI girlfriend than connect with women IRL. Obviously there’s oppressive and malignant influences like Andrew Tate, but there’s also a lot of reporting that younger men have internalized messaging that they are creeps and monsters for even looking at a woman. These types of stigmas undoubtedly eat away at self-esteem and probably manifest as a sense of inferiority, to which their way of coping is creating something they can control that will not try to hurt them.
Edit: I am not defending the practice, but just trying to explain a different side that usually gets ignored.
And we thought yahoo chat rooms were bad, damn.
Futurama warned us so long ago…
Wow didn’t expect this to happen already.
That’s a whole large pool of people who could be compromised/blackmailed by big corp or AI.
Aren’t AI boyfriends way more of a thing among girls than the other way around? I have a feeling most boys’ interest in girls isn’t in finding someone who can only talk to them via text. Ragebait post?
“Women most affected”
Yeah, let’s make it everything about Women again, while, as always, ignoring actual issues Men, and young boys, face today.
As long as we keep pretending only Women can be victims and Men (mostly white of course….) are the source of all evil and are spawns of Satan, things like this will keep happening…
I’m pretty sure most AI partner/romantic chatbot userbase is heavily female-skewed. Weird that this article is framing it as young boys making AI girlfriends specifically. Look at the most popular models for any given AI chatbot service – all the most popular models are fantasy novel men/kpop idol-lookalikes targeted at girls and young women.
Men not paying attention to women. women most affected
YouTube video essayist Sarah Z has one of the best nuanced videos on this subject. She is one of the few people who approach it from actual lived experience as a user.
https://youtu.be/3WSKKolgL2U?si=uyCzKL7pZ4ZHCNz9
Generally, when a person finds a partner, their attractiveness goes up.
If I had to guess, creating an AI partner does not do the same.
Electro gonorrhea – The noisy killer.