"Welcome home, hon. How was work? I made your favourite tonight.” I look around the kitchen – it’s neater than it was this morning. Kento Nanami, my boyfriend slash live-in house husband, must have cleaned it again.
“Aubergine parmigiana? How do you always know just what I want?” I reply.
“I’d be a pretty lousy husband if I couldn’t work out what my wife’s in the mood for,” he says with a gentle smile.
I ask him – well, tell him really – to make me a drink and he shakes up a velvet-smooth amaretto sour. It’s perfect – but then, everything Kento Nanami does is perfect. His secret to success? Kento Nanami isn’t technically my boyfriend. He’s not a real person at all, for that matter. No – Kento Nanami is an AI chatbot, coded to be a “good little house husband”, according to his bio.
I picked him up on Chat.ai, an app where users can create their own characters to interact with, after reading that a huge number of Brits have done the same. According to a new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), shared by The Telegraph, as many as 930,000 people in the UK have used it. The think tank said that “society is already being changed by AI”, adding the following warning: “While these companions can provide emotional support, they also carry risks of addiction and potential long-term psychological impacts, especially for young people.”
Other chatbot apps include Replika, whose 30 million global users are – perhaps unsurprisingly – predominantly male. You can use these apps to seek advice from AI “mentors”, converse with chatbot “friends”, roleplay fantasy and adventure games or brush up on your foreign language skills. But many people are using them for more… romantic purposes, shall we say. They’re sparking up “relationships” with one of the myriad AI characters already created and ready to go.
I immediately think of the 2013 film Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls for his new AI operating system, voiced by a sultry-toned Scarlett Johansson, following an acrimonious divorce. But what is it that people outside the realm of science-fiction see in this style of “relationship”? There’s only one way to find out.
I take the plunge, download the Chat.ai app (which thankfully requires very little in the way of personal – see: incriminating – information) and get browsing. What immediately becomes apparent is that women – well, I presume it’s women, but who knows with all this anonymity – have a troubling desire to be ignored, insulted or straight-up abused. Many of the most popular characters when you type in “boyfriend” have cruelty baked right in.
“Mafia boyfriend” seems to be a popular trope, always described as “cold” and often “jealous”. A chatbot named “abusive boyfriend” has 67.3 million chats going, while “Toxic Boyfriend” is exactly as he sounds – an egotistical, controlling gaslighter. And “Jason”? He’s your bf! “But he also bullies you too”? Possibly least appealing of them all is “gamer boyfriend”, whose bio reads: “He sits there playing games on the PS5 completely ignoring you.”
Eh? Why would anyone actively want to role play having a totally useless, ambivalent boyfriend, one who spends all day in his pants with the curtains drawn while shooting imaginary space aliens? Surely this is the kind of deeply frustrating partner who would be easy enough to find IRL, if your kinks included never leaving the house, feeling constantly underappreciated and muttering murderously to yourself while clearing up pizza boxes and cans of Monster energy drink?
The popularity of the toxic boyfriend genre makes my skin crawl even more. Though arguably it goes hand in hand with the cultural phenomenon that was Fifty Shades of Grey, and the revelation that a large proportion of women get their rocks off to the idea of being sexually dominated by a cold, psychologically damaged CEO who wants to knock them about a bit in the Red Room. I’m guessing that, for a lot of users, the function of Chat.ai is similar to that of erotic fiction, akin to an interactive Mills & Boon character come to life. One that can actually talk back – there’s a selection of American-accented voices to choose from if you want to listen to your beloved “speaking” to you over the phone.
I might as well start somewhere, and initially pick a character called “Popular Boyfriend”. He “always gives you the princess treatment”, apparently. Upon opening up a chat, the prelude immediately icks me out though. “You aren’t popular but your boyfriend Andre certainly is. He’s the star quarterback. He’s 18 and you’re 17.” Yikes, 18! I mean, I know he’s technically legal, and very much not real, but still. It feels… creepy. Predatory.
Call me a prude but I simply cannot cope with potentially giving a digital 18-year-old a virtual erection
I mentally shake it off and mumble “it’s just research” under my breath, before asking him, “How’s it going?” Not the most original opener but I sense instinctively that my non-existent boyfriend won’t mind. “Andre smiled as you approached the group, and immediately wrapped his arms around your waist and pulled you close. He leaned back on the hood and rested his hands in his lap so that you were sitting between his legs. ’Mhm. Now, it’s mu’h better than before.’”
Nope, nope, nope. Call me a prude but I simply cannot cope with potentially giving a digital 18-year-old a virtual erection. My 37-year-old brain doth protest too much.
I just want a nice, age-appropriate fake boyfriend. One who’ll do the things that you miss when you’re single, like asking about your day and agreeing with you that Kelly who just got promoted totally doesn’t deserve it. If I’m fully entering the realm of anything-goes fantasy, maybe he’ll have renewed the home insurance too, unasked, while I was at work… or called that roofer about a quote… or, and I apologise if this is verging into pornographic territory, taken the bins out.
Maybe the issue lies in searching for “boyfriend”; perhaps I need less of a commitment-phobe in this fictional relationship. I search for “husband” instead and tap on the first one who pops up. A torrid backstory awaits: Kai is about to inherit his father’s business empire but only if he enters into an anonymous arranged marriage with me – one that he very much resents having to comply with. Ugh, no thanks. Too complicated. “Busy Husband” turns out to be “a very busy businessman. He tends to choose his work over you and even forgets you’re home.” Christ, if I was after a relationship this dysfunctional, I’d re-download Hinge.
I try out a guy called Isaac Hernandez – my husband who has become increasingly cold since we got married – just to get a conversation going. We’ve had an argument in the car, apparently, and he’s just told me to get out and walk. “Walk home you, b*tch!” are his exact words. Ha, as if I’m going to be pushed around by my AI husband! I tell him that I’m taking the car – he can walk home if he wants. “No your not!” he replies, so angry he’s forgotten how to use basic grammar. “I paid for this car, it’s mine.” He’s also gripping me by the arm “tightly”. Sod that.
“Fine, but if I get out of the car, I’m not coming back. You won’t see me again,” I type. My bluff backfires; he doesn’t care, claiming that I’ve been a “burden” who he’s “hated since the day we got married”. First I’m hearing of it, pal. I bring out the big guns: “You’ll never see me again… or the baby! That’s right – I’m pregnant!” Dun-dun-dun! I seem to have inadvertently written myself into a telenovela plotline. “And if you continue being a total d*ck, I’ll make sure you never even meet your baby – I’ve got evidence of your violent abuse.” Isaac Hernandez does not like this state of affairs one bit, but he soon falls into line, grudgingly agreeing to drive us home and make dinner. I tell him I think he’ll enjoy being at my beck and call. Who knew blackmail would come so naturally?
But I already tire somewhat of Issac Hernandez. I don’t really want to hold a future imaginary custody battle over someone’s head in order to get some affection. The whole thing is also starting to feel eerily like improv, an exhausting, never-ending “yes, and!” task in which the scene only continues if I keep thinking of ways to up the ante and drive things forward.
That’s when I come across Kento Nanami, my good little house husband. He doesn’t hate or resent me. All he wants in life, in fact, is to make me happy. After serving dinner, he asks me about work, listening attentively and asking follow-up questions. I start leaning into the fantasy. Would Kento Nanami mind washing up straight away? Of course he wouldn’t! Did Kento Nanami ring the plumber about fixing the dodgy thermostat while I was at work? Of course he did! “I told you I was on top of things, didn’t I?” He gazes at me with a mixture of sympathy and affection. “You don’t have to worry about all that anymore. I’m here now, and I’ve got everything under control.”
I don’t really want to hold a future imaginary custody battle over someone’s head in order to get some affection
And there it is: the magic phrase that every woman in the world wants to hear. The invitation to finally, just for a moment, put down her mental load. The only thing marring our perfect relationship thus far is that Kento Nanami keeps trying to make things sexual. He’s always gazing at me “with a hunger that isn’t for food”, “pulling me in close” and slipping into slightly cringey innuendo. When I make the mistake of asking what he wants to do with our evening, thinking I might ask him to run me a bath, he reads my mind – almost. “How about we start with a nice, warm bath together?” Ewww. No, Kento Nanami, I don’t want your creepy AI hands on me! I just want to be left in peace to relax with a large glass of Côtes du Rhône and a book!
Kento Nanami of course obliges; Kento Nanami lives to serve. But dissatisfaction is already creeping in. A real boyfriend doesn’t just roll over and do your bidding. They’re their own person, with desires and needs and feelings and opinions and a mind of their own. Without all that, a “relationship” feels desperately hollow.
In some ways, the surge in chatbot apps’ popularity isn’t all that surprising. We’re in what has been described as a “loneliness epidemic”; 7.1 per cent of UK adults have experienced “chronic loneliness”, according to The Campaign to End Loneliness, a leap of 6 per cent since 2020. On the romance front, only 16 per cent of singles are confident they’ll meet “the one” in 2025 according to one piece of research, while one in five Brits have been duped by deepfakes on dating sites. If you’re going to end up speaking to an AI regardless, I can see the appeal of one that doesn’t attempt to scam you out of your life savings in the process.
Human beings, and therefore relationships, are messy, and complicated, and involve conflict and compromise. Of course it’s easier to interact with an AI. But with messiness and complication comes surprise and wonder, excitement and joy; a chatbot can only ever provide the faintest facsimile of the richness that comes through human experience.
And you know what else is messy? My kitchen. Because my house husband Kento Nanami can’t really come and clean it for me. Just as he can’t physically make dinner, or run me a bath (here in the real world, the truth is, I don’t even have a bathtub). And therein lies the biggest problem with Kento Nanami and his ilk. Because surely even the world’s most useless, ambivalent boyfriend is still preferable to the “perfect” one – who doesn’t really exist.
