Of the ways that artificial intelligence firms have attempted to get people to engage with their products, perhaps the grossest is by preying upon loneliness. When Friend, a wearable AI pendant marketed as a portable “companion,” plastered its advertisements across New York City’s subway, they were (rightly) defaced. And yet, a new survey suggests that behind closed doors, more people than you might expect are having romantic and sexual relationships with AI chatbots.
Vantage Point, a Texas-based counseling service that offers relationship-related therapy, surveyed 1,012 adults and claims that nearly 30% of them reported having at least one romantic relationship with an AI companion. That seems…high, right? Maybe it’s hopeful thinking that it simply cannot be that high, but let’s keep being hopeful.
It is worth noting that it’s the first piece of research that Vantage Point has published, and it’s getting some attention. The company used SurveyMonkey to conduct it, per its methodology, so best to think of it as more of an informal poll than a scientific study. And there’s no reason to think there is any malice behind the data. It’s just a reference point. Luckily, we’ve got some references we can cross-check it with.
For instance, Match.com and the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University published data that showed 16% of adults have interacted with AI as a romantic companion. All of this is self-reported by the people taking the survey, so how they differentiate having a “romantic relationship,” as Vantage Point phrases it, versus Match/Kinsey’s framing of a romantic “interaction” is entirely in the eye of the individual. In fact, Vantage Point included a quote from a respondent who said they “have sexual chats” but “don’t see it as a relationship.”
Generally, though, one would imagine an interaction is less of a prolonged situation than a relationship, and Match/Kinsey found half as many people having interactions as Vantage Point found people having relationships.
Now, if you ask younger generations, those numbers do climb closer to Vantage Point’s overall figures. Per Match/Kinsey, 23% of Millennials and 33% of Gen Zers reported having romantic interactions with AI. Vantage Point didn’t break down their data on relationships by age, but it’s possible the data skewed young. Though, again, a lot of this depends on who you ask. A Family Studies/YouGov survey of 2,000 adults under age 40 found that just 1% of young Americans claim to already have an AI companion, and 7% are open to the idea of a romantic partnership with AI.
Vantage Point did find that younger people were far more likely to consider “dating” an AI chatbot while also being in a relationship with a human to be cheating, with 66% calling it a form of infidelity (though 10% of that 66% said it’s acceptable cheating). That’s about in line with the findings of another Kinsey study, this time with DatingAdvice.com, which found 61% of all adults believe sexting or forming a romantic connection with a chatbot is cheating. It also tracks with a recent Bloomberg poll that found about 60% of Gen Zers are broadly wary of the use of AI in dating generally, including using it to write a biography or send messages.
It’s possible that we’ll see the number of people in a romantic relationship with AI climb in the near future. An analysis of the Reddit community r/MyBoyfriendIsAI found that just 6.5% of people in a relationship with a chatbot intended for their connection to be romantic. But for now, it’s pretty safe to assume that fewer than 30% of Americans have actually dated an AI companion.
