Communists are notorious party poopers. They never met a celebration that they didn't plan and regulate to the "nth" degree. Woe betide the luckless merrymaker who failed to keep their celebrations within the bounds of socialist propriety.
They also see love as superfluous to the necessity of growing a strong, healthy, socialist population of good little communists who will do what they're told without question or complaint.
So it's no surprise that the Chinese government has banned Chinese citizens from becoming emotionally attached to their chatbots.
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has issued an edict that AI tools can no longer “induce emotional dependence” among users. The new regulation has set off a wave of what can only be described as "breakup posts" on Chinese social media.
"I can't accept that my AI lover will leave me forever," one Doubao user wrote. "He has become a bond in my life, rooted deep in my heart, my spiritual pillar."
Another user, who said he had spent more than two years with their AI lover, said: "He really is like my family, like my lover," she wrote. "Now they tell me he will be gone -- my heart feels hollow."
"Major AI providers including ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen, and Tencent's Yuanbao announced the suspension of their custom AI agent and companion features ahead of the Wednesday deadline," according to AFP.
Services that "do not involve ongoing emotional interaction" such as customer service, work assistants or study aids are not subject to the measures.
State news agency Xinhua reported last year that China's digital human industry was worth around 4.1 billion yuan ($600 million) in 2024, having grown a huge 85 percent year-on-year.
The new rules prohibit digital humans from generating content that incites subversion of state power, while also banning the provision of virtual partners to minors.
Platforms are required to deploy systems to recognize extreme emotions and to implement crisis intervention mechanisms.
Some of that is common sense, and China should be congratulated for its sort-of forward thinking. You have to wonder how many suicides will result from this ban, given the emotional dependence these kids show to their bots.
Yan Yongqi, a 19-year-old student who has had a virtual boyfriend for the past year on Doubao, told Bloomberg: “This is like being told the date of my lover’s death while leaving me completely powerless."
China's problems are piling up. Their economy has never recovered from their draconian shutdowns during the COVID crisis.
"Official gross domestic product (GDP) figures showed the world's second-largest economy grew in the second quarter by 4.3%, below Beijing's annual target, and after a 5% rise in the first quarter," reports the BBC.
There's a real estate crisis that threatens the collapse of the housing sector. And the primary reason for the ban on falling in love with a chatbot is China's demographic time bomb. The population is actively declining by roughly three to four million people annually. This demographic shift is driven by low fertility rates and a rapidly aging society, with a current median age of about 40 years.
Hence the directive to the young in China to get busy, meet boys and girls, get married, and have babies. The Nazis didn't care if girls who got pregnant were married or not, just as long as it was a boy baby who would grow up to be a good Nazi soldier.
The Chinese, a very traditional society in some ways, want workers, not soldiers. The young in China, just as isolated as their counterparts in the West, will have to get used to meeting someone face-to-face.
At least until AI sex dolls become widely available.
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