- One in 7 young adults engage in AI romantic relationships, many of them secret.
- Those in AI relationships report lower real-life relationship quality.
- AI companionship may detract from authentic human connections.
Counterfeit romances are becoming increasingly popular, even among young adults who are in a real-life relationship. A new study finds that 1 in 7 young adults who are dating, engaged or married also have a secret and frequent romantic attachment on the side with an AI chatbot. And most of them keep at least some aspect of that relationship a secret from their flesh-and-blood partner.
That’s according to a new study, “Secret Soulmates: How AI Romantic Companions Are Starting to Impact Real-Life Romantic Relationships in Young Adulthood,” by researchers at Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies. While the report notes challenges in quantifying exact prevalence, “even the most conservative of recent estimates reveal that AI romantic companionships are an emerging trend worth paying attention to in young adult relationship development.”
Those in simulated romantic relationships also tend to have lower real-life relationship quality, per the report.
What’s not clear is whether those using chatbots do so because they are in low-quality real relationships, or if connecting to an AI chatbot regularly reduces the real-life relationship quality, Brian Willoughby, associate director in the School of Family Life at BYU and a fellow at both the Wheatley and Family Studies institutes, told Deseret News.
It’s “pretty clear” that use of AI romantic companions is rising, Willoughby said. “Now how quickly they’re going up, where they’ll peak, I think that’s the big question.”
According to the study, based on a survey of 2,431 U.S. adults ages 18 to 30 who have a real-life romantic relationship, young men are slightly more likely to have an AI romantic companion than young women, but the gap is small.
And regardless of gender, a significant number don’t let their real-life partner know the extent of their interaction with the virtual partner. Nearly 30% said their human partner didn’t know at all about the romantic involvement with an AI companion, while 11% said their partner was “only somewhat aware” and 14% said their partner was “mostly but not fully aware” of the AI relationship. Taken together, that indicates fewer than half are completely aware of the artificial relationship.
More than two-thirds (69%) said they didn’t want their partner to learn the full extent of their use of AI romantic companions.
Willoughby describes a “really interesting kind of internal rationalization process people are going through now as they start to utilize these tools.”
They don’t think it’s cheating and seem to feel OK about it, but would not want a romantic partner to read a transcript of the pseudo romance interaction “because it’s going to feel and read as if I’m cheating on them,” according to Willoughby, who is also an associate editor for the Journal of Sex Research and serves as an assistant editor for the journal Emerging Adulthood.
The appeal of an AI companion
The research suggests versatility is part of the appeal, as some young people use chatbots for “emotional talk, role play or to create sexual content,” per the report.
The authors wrote: “We found that some dating, engaged and married young adults participated in sexual behaviors with AI companions apps, with 13% reporting that they often role play romantically or sexually with an AI companion. Nearly 1 in 10 (11%) also reported that they often use an AI companion to generate sexually explicit content and almost 1 in 10 (8%) reported that they regularly masturbated while talking to an AI companion.”
The researchers also found that about 10% don’t stick with just one AI romantic companion.
Besides the 10% to 15% of partnered young adults who have ongoing romantic interactions with AI, “we found that another 20% to 30% reported that they had at least experimented with using an AI romantic companion at some point in time,” the report authors wrote.
They said that could indicate someone tried and then abandoned use of that kind of technology, but it could also portend greater use in the future as an increasing share of young adults “are exposed to these types of AI platforms that mimic relationships.”
Among the reasons given for using an AI companion:
- It is easier to talk about feelings with AI than with real people: 68%
- Feelings can be more openly expressed with AI than with real people: 66%
- It’s easier to be themselves with an AI companion: 65%
- They wish their real-life partner behaved more like their simulated one: 50%
- They wish conversations with living, breathing partners were more like conversations with ersatz partner: 56%
What worries researchers and experts
An AI romance is “inherently one-sided,” Willoughby said. “It doesn’t require the type of sacrifice and back-and-forth that we know makes good relationships last in the long term. I think that’s the big concern here.”
He added, “These AI companions aren’t necessarily going to single-handedly end dating and relationships. But we’ve already seen a trend in young adulthood and adulthood of people disengaging from dating, from marriage, from family relationships because of a variety of reasons.”
Calling it a “digital distraction,” he said AI romantic companion use is “one more thing that can distract people from real human relationships. That, I think, is a concern.”
Besides being associated with “negative relationship quality in real-life romantic relationships,” use of the chatbots “is particularly linked” to lower stability in real relationships and greater risk of breakup or divorce, per the research.
The report highlights how simulated relationships fail to deliver the benefits a couple gets from reciprocal relationships that include accomplishing goals and overcoming obstacles together.
“AI companions, while mimicking human interaction, ultimately are simply not capable of true sacrifice and connection like real relationships,” Jason Carroll, director of the Marriage and Family Initiative at the Wheatley Institute, said in a written statement. “Because interactions with AI companions are by their nature counterfeit, we caution (against) using terms like ‘partner’ or ‘relationship’ to describe interactions with AI algorithms and technologies — such interactions can never be genuinely relational in nature because they lack the essential reciprocal dynamic of a true relationship.”
One-sided relationship
When AI simulations of romance were first gaining popularity, Jill Manning, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Louisville, Colorado, noted that people need real relationships in order to develop emotionally.
The illusion of a relationship created by AI could eventually become a delusion because it’s an echo chamber that’s completely one-sided, warned Manning, who was not involved with the new study.
Manning and more recently Willoughby both point out some similarities with use of pornography, which most people agree is problematic. As Deseret News has reported, “For years, experts have made one point about pornography: When males can choose what happens, what those engaged in sexual activity look like, and be titillated on the schedule of their choosing, how can a flesh-and-blood female compete?”
Similarly, when females can create a relationship that is emotionally satisfying all the time with AI, is available whenever one wants and continuously provides affirmation, how can a human male compete?
The study’s other authors are Michael Toscano, a senior fellow and director of the Family First Technology Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, Rebekah Hakala, a graduate student in the master program at BYU and undergraduate student Katrina Morris.