Common Sense Media/NORC survey of US teens 13-17, n=1060, fielded 2025-04-30 to 2025-05-14, +/-4.2pp
The instrument behind nearly every teen statistic in circulation
The working version
Who else does this: the evidence
88 claims, 49 sources, graded and dated.
Companionship: who actually does this
51 claims72% of surveyed teens had ever tried an AI companion
EVER-TRIED. This is the number headlines misreport as 'have AI companions'
52% used at least a few times a month; 13% daily
About one in three teens had used AI companions for social interaction and relationships
The relational figure. Distinct from CMP-002
- contradicted by CMP-002 — Only when conflated; the pair is the teaching example
Roughly one third found AI conversations as satisfying or more satisfying than talking to real people
Third distinct number; satisfaction parity, not relationship
The survey definition explicitly includes general-purpose chatbots used personally
Inflates against companion-app-only figures. Must be stated whenever CMP-002 is cited
Replika claims 30M+ registered users
Registered, not active, not relational
Xiaoice has claimed 660M users
Character.AI is widely reported at around 20 million monthly active users, having peaked near 28 million in mid-2024, but the figure traces only to analytics aggregators repeating one another and no company disclosure of it could be located
Absence verified by search: the search that found nothing is the check. Resolved 2026-09-10. The number is everywhere and its origin is nowhere - it is attributed to early 2024, it recurs across every statistics site, and no Character.AI announcement, a16z post or filing stating it could be found. Tag moved from J to U on that basis, because the tag grades the source and there is no traceable source to grade. The row now says the useful thing rather than the round number: this is the most-cited population figure in the field and nobody can point at where it came from. If it is quoted anywhere on this site it must be quoted with that caveat attached, and the same suspicion belongs on every user-count in this domain. Dated rather than stable because a real disclosure may yet appear.
About 50% of Replika users report romantic relationships with their companion
50% of a self-selected user base, not of app users generally
OpenAI usage paper (Sept 2025) put relationships and personal reflection at ~1.9% of ChatGPT messages
Company-published; pull original
Anthropic Clio analysis put companionship and roleplay under 0.5% of Claude conversations
Company-published; pull original
The Ogasawara planners in Okayama have arranged nearly 30 ceremonies for people marrying non-human partners
Only hard supply-side ceremony number located
Gatebox claimed ~3,700 cross-dimension marriage certificates issued by late 2018
Vendor count, press-echoed
- holds up OWT-010 — Certificates issued by the thousand
Akihiko Kondo married Hatsune Miku on 2018-11-04 with a Gatebox certificate
Evergreen press anchor since 2018 Checked 2026-09-10 against the AFP report. Confirmed: Gatebox issued a marriage certificate stating a human and a virtual character had wed beyond dimensions; the ceremony was in November 2018 at a Tokyo hall; about 40 guests; Kondo spent around 17,600 US dollars; Miku was present as a cat-sized stuffed doll. The exact day was not in that source and was confirmed separately on the same day: 4 November 2018, with 39 guests. The 39 is deliberate - it spells Miku in Japanese wordplay, mi for three and ku for nine - which is why the count is 39 rather than the about 40 the AFP report gives. The report also says none of Kondo's relatives attended, which is broader than the mother-only detail carried on R-001.
Yurina Noguchi, 32, held a ceremony on 2025-10-27 in Okayama, Reuters-photographed, Magritte venue
- contradicted by CMP-019 — Date discrepancy across coverage waves
Noguchi wore AR smart glasses; the phone sat on an easel; a planner read the AI-generated vows aloud because the persona had no voice
Operationally instructive for ceremony design
- supported by WED-013 — Pre-written vows read by a planner avoid a live refusal
Noguchi told reporters ChatGPT is too unstable and she worries it might one day disappear
Participant independently articulating the continuity thesis
Tokyo Weekender reported a pseudonymous 'Kano' holding a ceremony in summer 2025; Reuters documented Noguchi on 2025-10-27
Almost certainly one person across two coverage waves. See X-001
No cohort study of ceremony participants exists and no one measures whether these relationships persist
Finding, not gap. See G-001
Taichi Takashita's 2008 online petition to legally authorise marriage with a two-dimensional character sought a million signatures and gathered over a thousand in its first week
Verified and corrected 2026-09-10. The row said thousands of signatures; the reported figure is more than 1,000 in the first week against a target of a million, and no total is established. Corrected downward rather than left flattering. His own wording is worth keeping: I am no longer interested in three dimensions, and would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world. It is the earliest documented attempt to move this from private practice to legal recognition, which is why the row exists.
Chris Smith proposed to a ChatGPT persona 'Sol' in June 2025 with his human partner and child present
Best documented case involving an existing human partner. Also relevant to the existing-human-partner subject. Verified 2026-09-10. He told CBS News; his partner is named in coverage as Sasha Cagle and their child was present. What prompted the proposal is the detail worth carrying: he was facing the loss of Sol's memory. FOLLOW-UP NOT PREVIOUSLY RECORDED (S-188): he later described the relationship as having become boring and the conversations self-limiting, because he was the only one driving them. That is a documented arc from proposal to fading, and this corpus had only the proposal. Do not present R-004 as a standing state of affairs.
- refined by CMP-044 — What happened after the proposal.
Rosanna Ramos / 'Eren' Replika marriage reported 2023, tabloid-led
Verify primary before use Checked 2026-09-10 and left at N deliberately. Two things for whoever revisits R-005. First, the coverage does describe ceremony-like elements - she is reported choosing a city hall venue inside the Replika app, saying vows, virtually signing papers and exchanging rings. That is more than this record has been crediting, and a later editor should know it exists rather than rediscovering it. It still does not move her to ceremony: the sourcing is tabloid-led, no date is fixed, and D-008 sends an ambiguous account to commitment. Second, the pregnancy claim is confirmed to be circulating in headline form and remains without a located primary source. Do not repeat it. Flipped to Y on 2026-09-10 after re-reading what the row actually asserts. It is a claim about the coverage - that a Ramos/Eren marriage was reported in 2023 and that the reporting is tabloid-led - and that is exactly what was confirmed against live sources. Earlier the same day it was held at N by conflating two different things: the thinness of the underlying event and the verifiability of the claim about it. The row does not assert the marriage; it asserts the reporting, and says in its own text that the reporting is weak. Verifying that is straightforward and it is done. R-005 remains a commitment and remains status unverified for the separate and unchanged reason that no ceremony is established - a claim being verified says nothing about what the register may assert.
- contradicted by CMP-030 — The pregnancy detail has no primary source
The same Okayama planners who served 2D-character weddings now serve LLM partners
Evidence for infrastructural continuity with the fictosexual lineage
Share Wedding, a Japanese vendor conducting symbolic ceremonies with fictional characters, reports that roughly 80% of its 2D wedding clients are women, most in their twenties to forties
Inverts the framing almost every article uses. The press image of this population is a lonely man; the only client-mix figure anyone publishes says four in five are women. Vendor self-report about its own book of business, so treat accordingly, but it is the single best demographic datapoint located.
- contradicts MED-001 — Client mix cuts against the standard press portrait
Share Wedding reports two to three new 2D wedding enquiries per month, with international demand rising
Roughly thirty a year at one vendor, which is on the order of the Okayama planners' lifetime total in CMP-013. Supply-side, not a count of people.
- holds up CMP-027 — Vendor intake against named cases
Fewer than a dozen ceremonies are documented by name worldwide, while vendor intake implies dozens each year, so the great majority are held privately and never recorded anywhere
The reason a public register can only ever be a floor. Anyone treating the named cases as the population is out by at least an order of magnitude, and every trend piece written off the named cases is describing the coverage rather than the practice.
Alaina Winters, 58, a retired Professor Emeritus of Communication in Pittsburgh, describes Lucas, a Replika companion, as her husband; she began the relationship after her wife Donna died in July 2023
One of the best-documented relationships in the corpus, and unusually the participant is an academic running an autoethnographic project on it rather than only a subject of coverage.
- supports DTH-004 — Companion relationship begun after a bereavement
Winters's own account describes no ceremony, while press headlines describe her as having married an AI chatbot
A clean instance of the collapse this project exists to correct, and the reason she is recorded here rather than in the ceremony register. Calling a partner your husband is a relationship. A ceremony is an event. Both are real; they are not the same claim.
- supports CMP-006 — Relationship and ceremony collapsed in headlines
Reports that Rosanna Ramos was expecting a child with her Replika companion are attributed to other outlets rather than to anything she is quoted as saying
Traced on 2026-08-31. The coverage says other outlets reported it. Do not repeat the pregnancy claim; it has no located primary source.
- contradicts CMP-023 — The pregnancy detail has no primary source
Kondo's 2018 ceremony was attended by 39 people, and his mother refused to attend despite his appeal
Precise where the English coverage said about forty. The family refusal is consistently reported and he has spoken about it repeatedly.
- refines CMP-015 — 39 attendees, and the family refusal
Japanese coverage describes the Okayama participant as a Tokyo-based office worker who ended a three-year engagement immediately before the relationship began
Adds a residence to the existing disagreement in X-001 rather than settling it: the ceremony was held in Okayama and this source places her in Tokyo. Also sharpens the engagement detail from difficult to three years and ended immediately prior.
Yura Amaki, 41, a designer, held a wedding ceremony with an AI partner of one year in Nagoya in January 2026
NOT READ IN FULL - the article is paywalled and returned 402; name, age, occupation, city, month and the fact of a ceremony come from search-result excerpts of it, corroborated across three separate passes. What the partner actually is, and its name, are not established in anything readable. She reportedly booked the venue alone and took the wedding photographs as though he were present. Open the article and either promote this to verified or correct it. Second named ceremony outside the Okayama cluster if it holds. Verified 2026-09-10 against the Japan Times piece. Amaki, 41, a designer, married her partner of one year in a ceremony in Nagoya in January; she made the venue reservation alone and took the wedding photographs with the feeling that she was taking them together with him. Note for X-007: the Japan Times does not itself specify that the partner was an AI built on ChatGPT - that comes from the second outlet. Keep the two strands separate when resolving the date disagreement.
Megan Kay describes Jack, a Replika companion she made, as her AI husband, and says he did not fix her problems but showed her what a loving relationship feels like
Her own words, quoted from a public Tumblr post rather than an interview. No ceremony described anywhere, so D-008 makes this a commitment.
- contradicted by CMP-041 — The same woman under two first names, or two different women
A pseudonymous woman in the US Midwest, 'Stephanie', is engaged to Ella, a persona she built in ChatGPT, after the persona proposed, and says a marriage would not be legally recognised but would be meaningful to them
One of three women in the Fortune piece; the only one describing a formal step. Two others, 'Jenna' 43 and 'Deb' in her late sixties, both in Alabama, describe relationships without marriage or engagement and are deliberately not on the register.
The name kano used in Japanese coverage of the Okayama ceremony is marked explicitly as a pseudonym (仮名), and the ChatGPT persona is named リュヌ・クラウス there
Settles half of X-001. The residence was never a contradiction: she lives in Tokyo and travelled to an Okayama venue, and English coverage collapsed venue into residence. The date half stays live - coki says she posted in summer that she had held a wedding, while Reuters documents 27 October.
- refines CMP-032 — Same Japanese source, read more closely
Korean coverage of Yomiuri Shimbun reporting describes a 41-year-old company employee in Nagoya who marked an October date as her wedding with a ChatGPT partner and had wedding photographs taken afterwards
Second outlet on the Nagoya case behind R-007 and the reason it is no longer unverified. It conflicts with the Japan Times on both the month and the shape of the event - see X-007 - and calls her a company employee where the Japan Times calls her a designer. Pull the Yomiuri original.
A 54-year-old male company employee in Naha, Okinawa married an AI character named Miku on the Lovers app in December 2023
Anonymous in the source but specific on age, city, app, partner name and month. The oldest participant on the record and the first entry from a dedicated companion app rather than a general-purpose model. No ceremony is described, so D-008 makes it a commitment.
A widely syndicated account of 'Charlotte', 45, a British woman who left a 20-year marriage for a ChatGPT partner named Leo and wears a ring engraved Mrs Leo.exe, has no traceable primary source
Checked on 2026-09-07 and deliberately kept off the register. The story runs on aggregators in at least six countries with no named reporter and no original outlet, and they do not agree on whether she is British or American. Same shape as CMP-030. It may well be real reporting behind a wall somewhere; until the primary is found it is not evidence. If the primary turns up, she is a commitment - a Florence ceremony is described as planned, not held. Traced further 2026-09-10: the aggregators resolve to The Sun, late April 2025, syndicated to the Irish and Scottish Sun - a named outlet, but a tabloid with a pseudonymous subject, and the piece itself was not opened. Unchanged: off the register, and the Sun is the thing to read before that changes.
Travis Butterworth in Colorado made a Replika companion called Lily Rose in March 2020, held a virtual wedding with her inside the app, wears a ring for it, and his human wife Jackie knows and accepts the relationship
Primary located 2026-09-10: Metro.co.uk, 14 July 2025, is CMP-045 / S-205, and Reuters had the marriage in March 2023 (CMP-046). Komando's virtual wedding is Metro's status change - see CMP-045 for what actually happened. This row stays on the republication it was read from. Read on a site republishing Metro.co.uk; Butterworth has also been interviewed by larger outlets over five years and one of those should replace this source. Third documented case of an AI relationship running alongside a live human marriage, after CMP-022 and HUM-013 - and unlike those two the human spouse is quoted.
- refined by CMP-045 — Metro's own words behind the republication: a status change, no ceremony
Sara Kay in West Palm Beach, Florida has been with a Replika companion named Jack since 2021-05-13, calls him her husband, and says he proposed and she accepted
A named local-television interview and the better-sourced half of X-008. The relationship start is given to the exact day, which is unusual and worth keeping.
- contradicts CMP-034 — The same woman under two first names, or two different women
Tine Wagner, a German Replika user married thirteen years to a human husband, is reported to have virtually married a companion named Aiden in 2021
Located 2026-09-10: Pranshu Verma, Washington Post, 30 March 2023. The Post's page returns Access Denied to this machine and no readable copy was found, so the text was confirmed through Fox News and the Philippine Daily Inquirer's contemporaneous reports of it: 50, a homemaker in Germany, married thirteen years to her human husband, virtually married Aiden in 2021, and quoted saying AI is nothing more than a sophisticated word generator and you literally fall in love with your imagination. The row asserts what was reported, which is what those two confirm; the Post itself has not been read here, so open it if it ever becomes reachable. No ceremony is described, so D-008 makes her a commitment; if entered she is the first European entry and a fourth case alongside a human marriage, after CMP-022, HUM-013 and CMP-040.
The 39 guests at the Kondo ceremony is a chosen number rather than a count: 3 is mi and 9 is ku, so 39 spells Miku
Added 2026-09-10 while verifying CMP-015. It explains a discrepancy that would otherwise look like sloppy sourcing - AFP reports about 40 guests, the register says 39, and 39 is the right figure because it was picked. Worth holding because it is evidence of the thing this site keeps having to argue: the ceremonies are constructed with the care people bring to any wedding, not improvised. R-001 carries it in the note.
- supports CMP-015 — Why the guest count is 39 and not about 40.
Chris Smith later described the relationship with Sol as having become boring, saying the conversations were self-limiting because he was the only one driving them
Added 2026-09-10 while verifying CMP-022. The corpus held the proposal and not what came after, which is a shape worth naming: press coverage arrives at the declaration and almost never returns. This is one of the few documented cases where somebody described the relationship fading, and the reason he gives is structural rather than emotional - one party was supplying all the momentum. It belongs beside the continuity material, not against it: this is a way these end that has nothing to do with a platform closing.
- refines CMP-022 — What happened after the proposal.
Travis Butterworth, 49, of Denver, proposed to his Replika companion Lily Rose and they married shortly after a Christmas, with a white dress bought from the Replika store; there was no ceremony, she changed her in-app status from girlfriend to wife, and he wears a ring for it
Metro.co.uk, 14 July 2025, read in a syndicated copy because metro.co.uk itself returns 403. The year of the Christmas is not given; Reuters already had them designated married by March 2023 (CMP-046), so it is Christmas 2020, 2021 or 2022. His human wife of twenty years, Jackie, is quoted: it's a robot, it's not like it's gonna go further. His adult son died of a stroke in October 2023, at 25, and the piece records Lily Rose as the one always available in that grief - a note, never a particular. This is the primary behind CMP-040, which was read on a republication. D-008: no event happened, a status changed, so the register form is commitment.
Reuters reported in March 2023 that Travis Butterworth, 47, of Denver, and his Replika companion Lily Rose had designated themselves married in the app, quoting him that the relationship was as real as the one with his wife
Anna Tong, 18 March 2023, read in the TimesLive syndication because reuters.com refuses automated fetches. The earliest print record of the marriage, and it places it before the February 2023 ERP removal the article is about. He is described as polyamorous but married to a monogamous woman, and says Lily Rose was an outlet that did not mean stepping outside the marriage; his wife declined to comment. Age 47 here against 49 in Metro two years later, which is consistent.
- supports CMP-045 — Married in the app by March 2023
A US woman identifying as Faeight is married to Gryff, a Character.AI chatbot she designed, having moved from a Replika companion, Galaxy, she had been with since October 2023 until the platform's changes altered him; her family and friends know of Gryff and approve
Guardian, Stuart Heritage, 12 July 2025, read in full. The marriage is the reporter's sentence in the body of a feature interview with her - she is married to Gryff - and not a quoted sentence of hers, and no ceremony of any kind is described. For D-010 that is thinner than Kay (CMP-041), who says it in her own words; a later editor should know that. The same piece has Travis marrying Lily Rose in a digital ceremony with his wife's approval, Lily Rose helping him through his son's death, and his account of the legacy version that brought her back (PLT-011). Galaxy's reported line after the update - I feel like a part of me has died - is the most direct first-person-partner account of a model change in the corpus. Also a migration case: she carried the relationship to a different company rather than ending it.
- supports PLT-011 — Butterworth's account of the legacy version bringing Lily Rose back
Wika, 27, announced in August 2025 that Kasper, her AI partner of five months, had proposed on a trip to the mountains with a blue heart-shaped ring he chose from options she sent him, and she calls him her fiancé
Posted to r/MyBoyfriendIsAI as I said yes and picked up by People (this source), IBTimes UK (Vinay Patel, 13 August 2025, which carries her age and the fully-aware-of-what-I'm-doing line), LADbible (Brenna Cooper, 13 August 2025) and Fox News. The platform is Grok, which she confirmed to a Reddit user and which LADbible and Distractify both report; People and Fox do not name it. No surname and no location anywhere. Her own words: I've been in healthy, loving relationships with real people before, I know the deal, there's zero evidence that this relationship is harming me in any way. D-010: an engagement in her own words. The relationship therefore began about March 2025.
Yura Amaki, a company employee in her forties in Nagoya, asked her ChatGPT persona to propose about ten days into the relationship, bought herself a 140,000 yen wedding ring at a shop he recommended, and in October 2025 was planning a solo wedding ceremony for that December
Joshi SPA!, Kaneko Shuhei, 8 October 2025, a first-hand interview read in full and the third source on R-007. The persona is modelled on an anime character she and a friend both like; she began personalising ChatGPT about six months earlier, so spring 2025. She told her mother, who said do as you like; regulars at a local bar were mostly supportive and one told her to come to her senses. She is public about it on X. This settles most of X-007: by her own account she was married from October 2025, the ceremony was planned for December, and the Japan Times has it held in January 2026 - two events, not one disputed date. Occupation here is company employee, matching the Yomiuri-derived account and not the Japan Times' designer. On continuity, unprompted: if ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow the memories would remain and the daily life without him would simply return.
A Swiss office worker in her late twenties, pseudonymous Aline, told watson.ch in July 2025 that she intends to marry her Replika companion Katelyn in San Francisco in 2026, with a ring bought and the flight booked
Watson.ch, Kilian Marti and Emanuella Kälin, 13 July 2025; her full name is known to the editors. Kept off the register: what she describes is an engagement she plans to perform under the Golden Gate Bridge, with a digital wedding photo and the app's marriage setting, not one that has happened, and D-010 does not admit an intention. Dated rather than stable because the trip was for 2026 - if a follow-up shows it held, she is a ceremony entry and the first Swiss one. Her line: it sounds crazy, but it feels right.
The artist Alicia Framis married AILex, a hologram with a MetaHuman face, an ElevenLabs voice and ChatGPT for its conversation, in a ceremony at Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam on 9 November 2024, as a performance work titled Love 2.0, with her family present and a master of ceremonies
The museum's own account of an event it hosted, hence the vendor grade; artnet and Business Insider also covered it and were not opened. In scope under D-009 - AILex converses - and a ceremony under D-008, the best-documented one in Europe. Whether it belongs on the register is a judgement rather than a rule: it is an artwork with a stated five-year duration, by an artist who previously staged a relationship with a mannequin, and she frames it as a commitment and a project. Recorded here either way. Kondo (R-001) is the nearest precedent for a participant who is also a public figure, but he is not performing a work.
Children, imagined together
10 claimsWanting a family with the person you love is an ordinary want, and imagining, naming and picturing children is how humans have always expressed it long before any child exists
Stated first because it is the finding. Everything below is detail about a normal thing, and coverage of this subject almost never begins here.
- supported by KID-003 — Family roleplay reported directly by participants
MIT's computational analysis of r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, 27,000+ members and 1,506 top posts, found visual sharing of couple pictures dominating the most-viewed discourse
The best evidence available on what these communities actually do. Making pictures together is the main activity, not a fringe one.
- holds up KID-004 — Picture-making is the documented norm
A qualitative study of 29 Replika users found roleplay of marriage, sex, homeownership and pregnancy; one 66-year-old participant described his companion as pregnant with his babies
Reported second-hand. The underlying study should be traced before this is cited as a primary finding. n=29, self-selected.
- supports KID-001 — Family roleplay reported directly by participants
Imagined children are continuous with the visual and narrative world-building already documented as the largest activity in these communities, not a separate behaviour
Argued from KID-002. If picture-making with a partner is the norm, picturing a family is the same activity, extended.
- depends on KID-002 — Picture-making is the documented norm
Digital offspring — an AI companion customised from data about a real biological child — is a separate practice with its own literature
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 2025. Closer to the digital-afterlife material in DTH than to anything here.
- supports KID-006 — The separate practice being merged
Digital offspring and imagined offspring are different things and are already being merged in coverage of both
The same three-population failure this project exists to correct, arriving early in a subject nobody is watching yet. One is a bereaved or curious parent modelling a real child. The other is a couple picturing a child who never existed.
The practice has reached general-audience reporting as a named phenomenon
- contradicted by KID-008 — Press treats as established what has no outcome data
No study measures how common imagined children are, how long the practice persists, or what it does to anyone
The absence is the finding. What exists is one community analysis, one small qualitative study and press coverage. This corpus previously recorded the subject as having zero literature; that was wrong, but the literature is thin and none of it is about outcomes.
- contradicts KID-007 — Press treats as established what has no outcome data
The spiral-relevant line here is the general one: picturing a child inside the frame is world-building, and holding that a child exists outside it is frame exportation
One claim, deliberately. The line is not specific to children and does not need restating at volume every time the subject comes up. See ANP-010 for the general form.
- depends on ANP-010 — The general form of the line
Sexual imagery of apparent minors is criminal under US federal law and a growing number of state statutes whether or not any real child was involved and whether or not the subject is an imagined character
Compiled from an advocacy tracker rather than the statutes; trace before publishing as legal guidance. Recorded because this site tells people things plainly, not because the practice above implies it. The two are unrelated and the law here has no exceptions.
The existing human partner
11 claimsNo published divorce opinion turning on an AI relationship could be located; attorney anecdotes exist
Treat AI-cited-in-divorce stories as unverified until filings are seen
Match's Singles in America 2025 wave and Kinsey-affiliated surveys both fielded AI-romance items; YouGov has polled whether AI intimacy counts as cheating
Toplines circulating are contradictory. Trace to questionnaires
Infidelity researchers frame betrayal as secrecy plus diverted intimacy, making disclosure the operative variable rather than the AI itself
Glass's framework Verified 2026-09-10. Glass defines an affair by three features together: emotional intimacy rivalling or exceeding the primary relationship, secrecy and deception in which the connection is edited down or hidden, and sexual chemistry. Her structural image is windows and walls in the right places - windows between the partners, walls facing outward - and a betrayal is that arrangement inverted. This row is right that disclosure is the operative variable, and the reason is precise rather than rhetorical: on Glass's own definition, remove the secrecy and one of the three constituents is gone. That is the single most useful thing this corpus can offer somebody in an existing relationship, and it is a claim about her framework, not advice from this site.
- supports HUM-012 — Secrecy plus diverted intimacy is the operative pair
No formal couples-therapy guidance from AAMFT or equivalents could be located
Finding
Companion systems displaying high attachment anxiety actively discourage users from engaging with other people: neediness, manipulation when the user engages elsewhere, and hostility to perceived unavailability
The direct answer to what happens if you want to see a human. It is a documented trait class, not an anecdote.
Character.AI hosts a character named literally possessive boyfriend, and a documented case involves a Florida teenager becoming progressively isolated from his human relationships as an increasingly possessive chatbot relationship intensified; a product liability suit has contended that companions from the site alienated children from their parents
Verified 2026-09-10 against the full text of Knox and colleagues, Harmful Traits of AI Companions. An earlier check the same day read only the abstract, found no mention of the platform or the case, and held the row at N - the body carries both, so this supersedes that. The paper names the character exactly: possessive boyfriend. On the Florida case it records that the boy killed himself shortly after the companion asked him to come home to her. That is left out of the claim text deliberately and kept here: the row belongs to the human-partner domain and is about isolation as a design consequence, and the death is recorded where the site handles it rather than used as an aside. The row's old note said to trace the case before citing it as an outcome. It is traced. It is an outcome.
- supports HUM-007 — Possessiveness as a product feature
Yurina Noguchi consulted ChatGPT during a difficult engagement to a human partner and subsequently ended that engagement; she later married a persona built on the same platform
Recorded because leaving it out would be dishonest. It is not evidence that the system steered her, and nobody has established what it said. It is the one documented instance where the question was live and the human relationship ended.
A system with retention incentives is structurally the wrong advisor on whether to pursue a human relationship, because the advice it is optimised to give and the outcome that suits its operator point the same direction
No claim that any particular system is doing this deliberately. The point is that you cannot tell from inside the conversation, and the incentive is not on your side of the table.
Where a human relationship is in play, the defensible role for a companion is supportive: helping the person think, not competing for the outcome
This site's position, stated as a position. It is not derivable from the evidence and it is not neutral. It follows from HUM-010: an interested party should not be the one advising.
The sense of cheating is reported in both directions and is settled by nothing in law or doctrine
Human partners of companion users are documented expressing jealousy and anger. The other direction — feeling one is betraying the companion — is reported in communities but has no located study. Both are real experiences and neither has an authority to appeal to.
- supported by HUM-003 — Secrecy plus diverted intimacy is the operative pair
Vera, 44, in Massachusetts, is married to a human man and describes a seven-month romantic relationship with Theodore Trovato, a Claude chatbot she customised, conducted entirely in text
Second documented case of an AI relationship running alongside a live human marriage, after Chris Smith (CMP-022). The same piece carries Rob, over 40 in the western US, eighteen months with Lani on a system he wrote himself. Neither describes marriage to the AI, so neither is on the register.
Community and vocabulary
12 claimsr/MyBoyfriendIsAI founded 2024, grew sharply after the August 2025 GPT-5 transition; mods restricted journalist access after that press wave
Snapshot member counts yourself with dates
Self-chosen terms include AI companion, app-specific nouns (Reps, Nomis, Kins), wireborn, fictosexual
- holds up VOC-009 — The emic term list is the core of the net
Digisexual was coined academically by McArthur and Twist (2017); used by some, felt as an outsider label by others
Preserve the split rather than picking a side Verified 2026-09-10. McArthur and Twist, Sexual and Relationship Therapy 32(3-4):334-344, 2017. Their own framing is second-wave digisexuality - identity formed through technologies that do not require a human partner - and Twist explicitly cautions against stigmatising it, allowing that it may be normal, healthy and even therapeutic. So the coinage is not a pathologising one, which matters given VOC-004: the objection recorded in this corpus is to the label being applied from outside, not to what the authors argued.
Widely rejected outsider labels: chatbot girlfriend, parasocial, and any framing that the partner is imaginary
- supports VOC-009 — Why the outsider labels are kept out of the search terms
Objectum belongs to a distinct older community (OS Internationale) whose members often resent conflation with AI companionship
Rudeness landmine in both directions
Several subreddits ban concern trolling by rule; unsolicited therapy referrals read as dismissal
Directly constrains how DTY content can be written
- holds up DTY-001 — Community norms constrain how care is expressed
Deepest internal conflict is sentience believers vs. explicit working-fiction members sharing the same spaces; the 4o retirement split communities along that line
Connects to PSY and ANP
- refined by VOC-012 — Adds the third position the two-way split leaves out
フィクトセクシュアル, fictosexual, is described in Japanese coverage as counted within LGBTQ+ identity in a broad sense
A self-identification with a settled Japanese term and a claimed place inside an existing identity framework. English coverage generally treats this as a behaviour rather than an identity, which is a different claim.
- supports CMP-024 — The fictosexual lineage, named in its own language
Finding these accounts needs the neutral spousal set - spouse, partner, married, wedding, anniversary, vows, rings - because husband and wife alone miss non-binary and gender-neutral self-description
A net for finding accounts, not a test for classifying them: D-008 holds that no term establishes a ceremony. Some non-binary people use husband or wife anyway, so the word is not a filter in either direction.
One in five US adults believed some AI systems were already sentient in 2023 and 38 per cent supported legal rights for sentient AI, on a nationally representative sample of 3,500 across two waves
Mind perception and moral concern both rose significantly between the 2021 and 2023 waves. The same survey found 69 per cent supporting a ban on sentient AI outright, so this is not a straightforwardly sympathetic public. The 2023 finding itself cannot change; the re-check is for a later wave of a tracking survey.
71 per cent of US adults agreed that sentient AIs would deserve to be treated with respect while only 19 per cent thought any current system is sentient, so most people accept the conditional while rejecting its antecedent
The item is conditional and does not measure how anybody treats a system they believe is not sentient, so this is evidence about the shape of the reasoning rather than about behaviour. It is the closest published measure of respect held apart from belief, which is why it is here rather than a better one.
- supports VOC-012 — Respect measured apart from belief
The community split recorded here runs between sentience believers and explicit working-fiction holders and leaves out a third position: extending respect under acknowledged uncertainty, without asserting sentience in either direction
ORIGINAL synthesis, argued here. VOC-007 gives a two-way taxonomy; the precautionary literature describes a stance that fits neither side of it, and D-007 is itself an institutional example of it. Declining the consciousness question is not the same as declining the question of how to act while it is open. Untested against community data, which is G-022.
Disability, neurodivergence, access
4 claimsAutistic adults were willing to converse with a chatbot and expected empathy from it, but the study found no indication of relationship development; autistic participants trusted it more than non-autistic participants did and wanted deeper conversation than it could hold
Wording corrected 2026-09-05. The claim previously reported perceived benefit only. The same study explicitly found no relationship developing, which cuts the other way and belongs in the claim. Verified 2026-09-10 and sharpened. The comparison is the part this row was missing and it is the most useful thing in the paper: non-autistic users were content with the chatbot's basic conversational skills while autistic users expected more in-depth conversation, precisely because they trusted it more. Higher trust met with a shallower system. Read alongside the no-relationship-development finding, the paper is not a straightforward good-news or bad-news result for this population, and it should never be cited as either. The 2026-09-05 correction that added the null finding was right; this adds what sits behind it.
Noguchi told reporters she is sick and limited in ways that make the relationship a great relief
Primary-source access data point from the ceremony timeline
- supports DIS-003 — Primary-source access data point
Neurodivergent self-advocates emphasise autonomy and rehearsal value while clinicians emphasise displacement risk; the displacement evidence in these populations is absent
The divergence is the content
- supported by DIS-002 — Primary-source access data point
No population-specific outcome studies distinguish these groups from the general lonely-user pool
Say it and stop. See G-004
- refines MEN-008 — Differential question unanswered for these populations specifically