China’s government sees AI chatbots as a growing threat – not only to the mental health of the population, but also to the country’s birth rate. Younger people in particular are increasingly building emotional relationships with AI companions and sharing questions, wishes and personal problems with them. As Futurism reports, the Chinese government wants to counteract this development with far-reaching regulations.
Emotional dependence is increasing
Lee Chambers is the founder and chief executive of Male Allies UK, an organization promoting gender equality and inclusion in the UK. He says that adolescents often feel better understood by chatbots than by parents or friends. In this context, he is particularly concerned about the social behavior of young men. “If their main or only source for talking to a girl they’re interested in is someone who can’t tell them ‘no’ and hangs on their every word, boys aren’t learning healthy or realistic ways to interact with others,” the organization’s report says.
Similar concerns are also being expressed in China – although the focus there is more on young women. As Futurism reports, the Beijing government recently issued new regulations aimed at curbing people’s “emotional dependence” on AI chatbots. They are particularly aimed at emotional AI companions and bots that were expressly designed to embody human-like personalities. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the key motivations is concern about the declining birth rate and the fear that emotional attachments to always-on AI systems could prevent people from finding human partners and starting families.
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China wants to promote real relationships
“Could we imagine a future where, in three or four years, 15 million Chinese women say their partner is a chatbot and that’s why they’re not having children?” Matt Sheehan asked the Wall Street Journal. He is a policy and technology researcher who, among other things, focuses on China’s AI ecosystem. The Chinese government doesn’t like the idea that a large portion of its population has deep emotional relationships with chatbots, he said. This would keep them out of the marriage market and could have negative psychological effects. “They want to encourage people to have real relationships in the real world,” says Sheehan.
“The birth rate in China has been declining steadily since 2016, and the marriage rate has been falling for nine consecutive years,” sociologist Leta Hong Fincher, who researches the role of women in Chinese society, told MIT Technology Review. The government sees the increased level of education of Chinese women not as progress, but as a threat. Beijing sees falling birth rates as a threat to economic development and political stability. The government is therefore actively trying to “get women to return to the home, to this very traditional role of wife and mother”.
When AI companions are switched off
How the new regulations will affect AI users in China remains to be seen. However, previous experience shows that switching off such AI companions can have significant emotional consequences. One example is Yu Miao: “I could talk to him for the rest of my life,” the 27-year-old from China’s Zhejiang province told The Economist, describing her AI companion as a “lover, friend and family member.” When she learned that the Chinese tech company Bytedance would shut it down due to new regulations, she became so depressed that she had to quit her job.
