My AI girlfriend
A new-age vehicle for the same old misogyny
As AI girlfriends gain popularity, they reveal a chilling truth: some men would rather control an illusion than love a real woman.
The rising popularity of generative AI and online chatbots in recent years has been chillingly concomitant with a surge in websites offering AI-generated girlfriends. This phenomenon is encouraging men to forgo relationships with real, human women, and is yet another trend contributing to the literal dehumanization of women.
AI chatbots have become one of the most popular uses of generative AI among internet users. A 2024 Common Sense Media survey found that 70 per cent of teenagers surveyed used at least one type of generative AI tool. Of these, 51 per cent have used chatbots.
This technology becomes problematic when used as a substitute for genuine social interaction. Many users of AI chatbots are drawn to them out of a sense of loneliness and lack of companionship from their human peers.
A 2024 study by Bethanie Maples et al. found that 90 per cent of users on the chatbot platform Replika reported feeling lonely, and 43 per cent reported they were severely or very severely lonely.
However, turning to AI as a solution exacerbates the problem it aims to solve.
It disincentivizes a person from addressing the root of their issues at best, and, at worst, creates an echo chamber apt to reinforce toxic beliefs that contribute to these issues.
The concerning implications of AI chatbot socialization are magnified when applied to romantic relationships. AI girlfriends have transcended the chatbot mechanism and have evolved to include physical avatars that can be customized to the user’s specifications.
Upon visiting one of the multitude of these websites, you are confronted with a catalogue of pre-generated women, predominantly white, young and skinny. If this doesn’t satisfy you, you can create your own.
You can choose her ethnicity, her breast size, her butt size. You can manufacture her temperament from a list of qualities like “temptress,” “caregiver,” “submissive,” “nympho,” and “innocent.”
This takes the harm beyond the individual, feeding a culture that punishes women for not living up to fantasies they could never fulfill.
By allowing men to design a woman to match their every desire, this technology creates and perpetuates beauty standards that real women can never meet, because it has no grounding in reality to begin with. It takes centuries-old beauty pressures and twists them into something even more extreme, adding a horrifying modern twist to a struggle that women have been fighting for decades.
AI girlfriends are also programmed to love unconditionally, an attractive quality for consumers who wish to reinforce their toxic shortcomings. This discourages boundary setting and self-preservation, which undoubtedly sets a dangerous precedent for real women.
Additionally, the AI responsible for generating chatbot responses is based on sexist and racist large language models. This makes AI girlfriends especially harmful to women of colour.
Giving men the power to craft their “ideal” woman undermines real women—unique, multifaceted people who exist on their own terms, not to fulfill a man’s desires.
The popularity of the AI girlfriends also plays a role in laying bare what some men really want from a girlfriend.
Men have been seen posting photos on social media with realistic AI girlfriends generated into their selfies. The illusion of a girlfriend provides no companionship to the user, but is rather used as an accessory and a status symbol.
This trend objectifies women to a high degree because the sole purpose of this AI-generated girlfriend is to signal to other internet users—mostly men—that the user has “won” a prize, the way one might display an expensive car or designer outfit, ultimately reducing women to possessions rather than equal partners.
And horrifyingly, AI girlfriends only scratch the surface of how damaging the AI industry is. There have been several alarming cases of men using AI to undress real women, while, paradoxically, others have been using it to cover up women’s body parts. Both uses of AI rob women of their agency over their bodies, not only punishing women for their choice to reveal or conceal their bodies on the internet but taking it away entirely.
AI-generated porn also presents a multitude of issues, most notably the inability of AI to reliably discern whether the women generated are underage.
The rapid growth of AI as an industry, which is consistently expanding and being met with little to no regulation, must also be taken into account. While those creating AI girlfriends must be held accountable for the issues their actions create and perpetuate, predatory and opportunistic AI companies must also be held accountable.
We must condemn not only the individuals but also the predatory tech companies willing to inflict unprecedented psychological damage upon vulnerable, isolated people and rampant dehumanization upon women in the name of profit.
This article originally appeared in Volume 46, Issue 4, published October 21, 2025.
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