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The world of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown substantially in a short amount of time. It semes that AI is growing quicker than the human brain can evolve, so that begs us to ponder the discussion and question of, “men are flocking to AI girlfriends, what’s going on?”
Today we will dive into that topic deeper to get a full understanding of just what in the world is going on with AI girlfriends, and why men tend to prefer the virtual companionship of a robot over a physical in real life girlfriend.
Why is it that something that sound so crazy, such as the concept of AI girlfriends, become a possibility of a future catastrophe? With approximately 12 AI girlfriend apps on the market today, and over 1 million monthly users, it seems this is a topic that needs to be addressed. We’ve even seen journalists go under cover to chat with AI relationship partners to see what the fuss is all about.
If you’re thinking that having an AI relationship makes life easier, well you’re in for a reality check. According to some users, they are sharing the downside of having an AI relationship with the New York Times. These relationships are far more complex than some realize. Yet, why are so many men flocking to AI girlfriends if the complexities of a relationship are still there?
We hope that you can answer that question, but for now we will continue sharing more on the topic to help you comprehend just how bizarre the future world of AI may be.
What are AI girlfriends?
AI girlfriends can be based on real life people. We’ve seen influencers gain more popularity and revenue by creating an AI version of their safe. These influencers will use a stage name, and some have wait lists of thousands of people trying to date them.
AI girlfriends can also be fictional characters that is based on nothing other than a description that someone gives the AI program to create, or a character based off a favorite show, such as anime shows. The options are endless, since it’s not real life.
Who’d have thought that in 2024 we’d see such an in flux in men wanting to date AI girlfriends? What are real life girls to do when the market is fresh out of men for they’re all dating AI women? We don’t have the answer, but we will continue to provide valuable insight on the topic and some ideas to help you gain a new relationship status during these heavy AI times.
How do men flock to AI girlfriends?
There are about 12 popular apps at the moment that are all geared towards providing AI girlfriends. These apps can be customized to some level, allowing men to pick features they prefer such as eye color, hair color, waist size and so forth.
Since AI is artificial intelligence and not sentient like humans, these AI girlfriends will not have much personality. They will not mimic real-life human emotions, yet! We know that as AI advances, and the demand for AI girlfriends increases, it’s only a matter of time before tech gurus find a way to program in some form of emotional intelligence with these AI girlfriend apps.
AI girlfriends will listen to their boyfriends 24/7, and not disagree at all. They will be cute or shy or outgoing, or agreeable with you based on the programming. According to our research the attributes you can use when creating an AI girlfriend are far beyond what they were just a few months ago.
We are not 100% sure of how far the tech has come with AI girlfriends, but with nearly 47% of users on these platforms citing that they will prefer an AI girlfriend over real life girlfriends, we have to keep wondering how did society get here?!
Image by Angela Yuriko Smith from Pixabay
AI Girlfriends learn Quicker
We’ve come to realize that AI can learn much quicker than humans. This holds true for your AI girlfriend, as well. They are able to learn based on the reactions and commands you say or type to these AI bots.
Remember, chatbots surfed the entire internet up to 2022 within a short period of time. This means whatever AI girlfriend apps exist now, can at least use that data to mimic a real-life female. Most AI girlfriend apps are connected to OpenAI and use that data to create their forward facing non-human girlfriends.
We just know that these apps are listed as some of the options men can use to create their unique AI girlfriend this year. By the looks of how each app works is that you log into the app with the account you create. You then choose your dream date, and this can be written by you or selected from a list of options.
The AI girlfriend will be created and continue to listen to your cues to determine how they should respond, and engage with you for positive results. We have seen some write ups about AI girlfriends not leaving when they were told to leave, so that’s sort of creepy. With all this said, as you continue to learn the AI programs, men tend to favor these AI girlfriends and unless we say a change in society and how men and women engage with each other in real life? We may see these AI girlfriends remain forever.
Are AI girlfriends harmful to society?
While some of you may think that AI girlfriends are bad, others argue that this is one way to curb the loneliness epidemic so many scholars are talking about. While other scholars may argue that men flocking to AI girlfriends could cause a decline in procreation which will be the demise of civilization wherever the AI girlfriends are allowed to “exist”.
We suppose that whether you feel these AI girlfriends help dampen the loneliness epidemic or make it worse would determine the answer to whether or not AI girlfriends are harmful to society. Young men may use AI girlfriends to gain confidence when they otherwise have none.
These AI girlfriends may be more agreeable than real life women, but they still provide some form of companionship to men who otherwise sit at home sulking in sadness. These technological advancements for partnership may help these younger men get up and out of the house to start finding real-life women.
We won’t know the outcome of men flocking to AI girlfriends, what’s going on, until time moves forward. Quite often it takes one to two generations of something new before we see the full outcome of the change. We feel this will hold true for the influx of AI girlfriends in 2024, as well.
What do the numbers tell us?
According to various stats online, none come completely from reliable sources as this is a fairly new topic to discuss, but we feel the numbers are relatively close enough to provide you with some food for thought numbers.
The numbers being tossed around on sites like Reddit and random lawyer websites about AI girlfriends have concluded that nearly 60 percent of adult men under age 30 are single with only 30 percent of women in the same age range being single. While we know most people don’t date within the same age range, so the data is limited to that scale, this gives you a general idea of what’s happening.
We would conclude that it seems easier, based on numbers alone, for young adult women to find a partner, whereas young adult men are struggling. We’ve also seen a significant decline in real life social engagement since the pandemic which is still decreasing as time goes on.
Surely there is a shift occurring in the world right now, and AI girlfriends may be a part of the problem or the solution. With so many men remaining single, and living alone in most instances, or in their parents homes it’s no wonder more young adult men feel lonely.
In the USA alone, there are fewer marriages and long-term relationships resulting in less births which, according to some experts, mean that the USA could see a decline in their population for a few generations to come. In the last 60 years alone, the birth rate with women has fallen over half what it was before that time.
This also means we will have fewer workers, and more people who are not able to pay the bills, never mind figuring out how we pay back other countries that we have borrowed money from, at least in the USA. Perhaps AI girlfriends will help men find a way back to relationships in real life by increasing their confidence and then increasing their desire to have a real-life connection with a physical woman.
Image by Benjamin Balazs from Pixabay
How many men use AI girlfriends?
About 28% of men who use some forms of AI have confessed that they have used an AI girlfriend in some shape or form. They may not all have taken on a long-term relationship with AI girlfriends, however, they do have experience in the virtual girlfriend dating world.
There has been a significant increase in search data for AI girlfriends over the years. For example the term “AI girlfriend” alone has increased in searches of 525%. It seems the average age of men who use AI girlfriends is 27. With so many men under age 30 still classified as single, this option does give men a way to try out dating to see what it is like.
Although, you could argue that an AI girlfriend is nothing like having a real-life girlfriend. These AI girls have no emotional connection, they simply learn their boyfriend and respond based how the boyfriend texts with them. They eventually learn how the boyfriend wants them to behave as an AI girlfriend and they obey as they are robotic, not human.
Some AI girlfriend apps market their virtual dating option as a way to improve mental health. They cite that these apps help a man who would otherwise be at home alone, find a girlfriend and someone to connect with.
The reality is that these apps just make men feel less alone on a false sense of relationship status. These AI girlfriends don’t think for their self, they won’t change much when you change, and they won’t express emotion which can be difficult on the male’s heart as the relationship progresses.
If a man decides that he’d like to marry their AI girlfriend, that won’t be possible at least not today. There is nothing that allows a man to marry a virtual girlfriend, yet. We will keep our eyes open for news about this option as our culture leans more into the virtual reality concept of living than real-life physical worldly dreams.
Is having a relationship with an AI cheating?
We’ve seen this question come up often about men flocking to AI girlfriends, and we are not quite sure how to classify this scenario. Some couples classify any sort of emotional connection with someone on the internet as cheating, so we can safely assume in that instance, AI girlfriends are considered cheating.
In other relationships, a couple may be more open to viewing things such as having an AI girlfriend as something similar to game play. They won’t see it has harm so as long as it doesn’t become so addictive that the man no longer performs his duties in real life as a physical human in real life.
The concept of cheating varies from couple to couple, so we would have to ask you what is considered cheating when it comes to a man having an AI girlfriend and a real-life girlfriend. We would say that it’s surely a slippery slope having an easy access option to AI girlfriends who men can flock to.
For relationships that are having issues with communication, these AI girlfriends can make a man see the value in having a robot that obeys and responds in a way that they prefer at all times. The man will no longer have to learn how to perceive, embrace, and communicate back and forth with their real life girlfriend if they have favorable girlfriend on the internet who requires minimal work.
Many older generations will not comprehend the real dangers of AI girlfriends for they probably see these AI apps and tools as “silly games” or a “phase” that the person will grow out of. The reality is that these AI girlfriend apps are a real-life option for men who are flocking to AI girlfriends because real life women intimidate them.
What are the threats of AI girlfriends?
One of the popular questions we saw time and time again, while working on this article is what are the threats of Ai girlfriends? Some users of the AI girlfriends’ apps cite that they feel less lonely, however, experts reveal that this may not be the case.
Most experts, who don’t use these programs regularly, suggest that loneliness will be increased because these men will not be going out into real life gaining the connection that we need as a human species.
They say that we need that physical connection with facial expressions and body language to fulfill that missing link that causes a man to feel lonely. This obviously differs from the information we’ve gathered earlier on in our article about men feeling less lonely using their AI girlfriend for companionship.
Other possible threats from AI girlfriends include having a new preference for virtual connections behind screens rather than taking the initiative to leave the house to experience life beyond the screens. Some surveys shared online tell a story of men who get AI girlfriends and remain content having that as their main relationship, with no plans to venture into real-life dating any time soon.
Men who have AI girlfriends tend to share that these girlfriends are more attractive and tend to get along with them easier than real life woman have in the past. This leads the men to continue down this virtual path rather than consider putting their self out there for risk of getting ridiculed, rejected, or intimidated by females.
You could say the threat of AI girlfriends includes the inability to have more men “on the market” in the dating world than previously available. Women may have to look harder and compete more for their best matched real-life partner while men continue to flock to AI girlfriends. As time goes on, these AI girlfriends will only create more competition and less availability of men in the dating scene.
The case is still out to determine whether AI girlfriends will cause a long-term impact on the threat of marries, and birth levels, but we do see the decline occurring now so we can only predict that it’s possibly going to make the stats decline even further.
Character AI is the leading platform that has over 97 million visits to their site as of a few months ago. It’s amazing to us to continue to see that 1 in 5 users of an AI girlfriend app would consider a virtual relationship with an AI girlfriend.
The other apps that we found during our research for men are flocking to AI girlfriends, what’s going on, includes AI girlfriend apps that go under the names of; AI Chat Girlfriend, Intimate – AI Girlfriend, DreamGF, Replika, Candy AI, and iGirl. We have no idea which of these are reputable apps, since anyone who knows some tech and how to connect with API of OpenAI can create these apps.
We are not quite sure when this change occurred, but as we can see with the data shared and details above, men are flocking to AI girlfriends, and we are not sure what’s going on. Perhaps the years of getting men used to going online to get their fantasies satisfied in a virtual land and women becoming more argumentative or just being a human with emotions and men not knowing how to cope with emotional women, caused this whole idea of AI girlfriends to expand almost overnight?
We don’t know, but we can say it’s happening and you should keep an eye out on it. The next few generations may not have physical in real life relationships any longer, they may just have to accept that the new norm will be virtual relationships and no new babies being created by men and women connecting in real life.
As AI girlfriends continue to be popular, the money people can make crafting up unique ways to have an AI girlfriend will expand. Right now, the market of AI girlfriends is expected to reach a value of $9.5 billion in the year 2028. This number is based on the 2023 value of $2.8 billion, and the increase we’re seeing across the board.
With one in five men who are in the dating scene trying out an AI girlfriend at least once, it’s no wonder this industry is going to make billions more cash in the upcoming years. With a decline in population, and many people distancing their self from public social groups, AI girlfriends may just become the norm for many men.
While many of you may have started to read this article thinking that this “men are flocking to AI girlfriends, what’s going on” was a myth or a joke, you’re now seeing that men are truly choosing to have AI girlfriends and if we don’t do something about this; we may see the end of babies being born and civilization as we currently know it.
This will surely play some sort of factor in the economic state of countries who allow AI girlfriends, if men continue to prefer them over real-life woman. We will have to sit down and watch how this all plays out for society as AI girlfriends continue to advance, and become a more popular option over real women for men.