219
1 In 5 Boys Know Someone Their Age Who's In A Relationship With An AI Chatbot
(www.huffingtonpost.co.uk)
This can’t go well.
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
219 points (97.0% liked)
Not The Onion
21266 readers
2699 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah, this is a recipe for disaster.
Maybe there are benefits in that boys whom otherwise would be just lonely and alone find that they can have conversations with the void/hivebrain. But the "relationship" aspect of this is just more bad news for the overall psychology of our kids.
...reading more of the article...
Chambers noted that chatbots are, by default, submissive, and reassure and reaffirm people’s thoughts because “they want you to like them”. “On top of this you can create your perfect ‘person’, moulding not only how they look but how they respond to you, how they treat you, and you can start and stop the relationship on a whim. This isn’t real life – and these instant gratification behaviours seeping into real life will have consequences.”
Yeah, that seems not good.
Put yourself in the shoes of an angsty insecure teenager.
Why wouldn't you want to sit around in a fantasy relationship with a chatbot that tells you how wonderful you are hours each day?
When I was an angsty teen I was in chatrooms hours a day looking for validation and socialization from strangers because I wans't getting at home or at school, because I was in shitty backwater town full of ignorant multi-generational townie morons. I was socially popular and had girlfriends but the insularity of my local community still drove me online to find people who were more open-minded.
And I never got what I was looking for until I got to college, where I finally got to meet people from all over the world who didn't think I was a secretly a queer for not liking football and preferring soccer. I had professors and friend who praised and congratulated me for being academically inclined, rather than mocking and deriding me for it. I think adults forget how oppressive some communities and families are towards their children, because you forget the fact as a teen/child you have zero control or freedom over your environment and the internet is really the only place you get to exercise control. I'm not sure what I'd have done without the internet as a teen, as my daily life was full of suicidal ideation from the ages of 12-18 due to the ever-present oppression of my environment.
As someone who also grew up like this, I second this.
Those adults are ofeltrn fully aware of how oppressive it is, and like it.that way. That's why there's a multi-front push to remove options. School phone bans, age verification, library book bans, ebike bans, and more are all happening at the same time and I suspect for the same reason: systematically cutting off every Escape Route One by One to enable total isolation for indoctrination
this stat sounds dodgy
load more comments
(2 replies)
Heard a god tier analogy from a friend:
"Electricity is very dangerous, but when it is controlled, in the form of a wall outlet, the risk of harm is greatly reduced to consumers. AI, in it's current state with minimal or easily bypassed protections, is like handing the consumer a live wire."
I get that we should protect people from obvious danger but part of me struggles with the ridiculous levels of stupidity some of us fall prey to. I don't know if it's due to a misplaced sense of justice, cause and effect, or just me being a dick, but I want to let people deal with the consequences of their stupidity on their own. If a computer can convince you not to use your brain then I don't think you were using it much to begin with.
some of us fall prey to.
new technology presents new issues.
This is just a more accessible phone sex line. It tells you what you want to hear and charges you for it.
yeah but without the labor phone sex workers provided. or the humanity and connection.
~I want to let people deal with the consequences of their stupidity on their own.~
Those consequences affect a much much wider range of people, not just those who are stupid about it so it's not about protecting them, it is about protecting everyone including the ones who can't protect themselves.
It's basically the same as gambling, some people are way more susceptible to it than others. You can say: "fuck those people they're weak and deserve to go broke" or you can say we as a society owe them some sort of safeguard.
Electricity is useful tho
There are good uses for AI in science and medicine, primarily for number crunching and pattern recognition.
Not for making theories or decisions that require an understanding of those fields though.
Chat bots are just a cancer to humanity.
Here are some ways that AI has been helpful: https://crcs.seas.harvard.edu/news/10-wonderful-examples-using-artificial-intelligence-ai-good
^ I DO NOT AGREE WITH THE ENTIRE LIST ON THIS ARTICLE. ONLY SOME OF THESE DO I CONSIDER TO BE 'USEFUL'.
Edit: Fuck AI "art"
load more comments
(4 replies)
like handing the consumer a live wire.
Honestly, that's practically all of computerized information technology right now. Hackers, spammers, bots, foreign-state actors, trolls, viruses, government spying, manufacturer spying, information brokers, intrusive advertising, it's all just just teeming with bad stuff that requires education to navigate successfully.
All very troublesome numbers, but the headline doesn't come back in the article and seems quite overstated. If boys mostly know 100 people their age and they all know that same person in an AI relationship. It's really 0.2% of the agegroup that are in a relationship with AI. Not good, but vastly smaller that the other figures, like creating naked depictions of other people.
I agree, but I still think the “1 in 5 know” formulation is worthwhile. “0.2% of people are in a relationship with an ai” isn’t as concerning to me as “20% of men are receiving social signals that dating an ai is socially acceptable” is.
men and women both are turning to AI chatbots. adults do this as well.
because our social/romantic environment is toxic af and they want an escape from it.
I run a LLM on my local machine to to sex fantasy stuff.
I like strange things. Nobody wants what I want, so am I just supposed to become even WEIRDER than I am, let all that kinky energy turn toxic and then rapey or just type for 20 minutes a day about butt sex with an LLM that thinks everything I come up with is fantastic? Seems like the latter is pretty mild compared to the former.
We'd probably have a lot fewer rapey guys in the world when sex bots are a thing. Some dudes are just unfuckably gross. The world knows it, they know it. They didn't choose to look gross, have a weird body, be something unappealing, but they still have monkey instincts to stick their dick into something. That doesn't just go away because you're not good looking. It will turn into some bad energy if you just have to live your life that way. I mean, you don't have to look hard to see it in the world around us.
am I just supposed to become even WEIRDER than I am, let all that kinky energy turn toxic and then rapey
No.
type for 20 minutes a day about butt sex with an LLM
You do you, but if it's reinforcing isolation, also maybe no? I sure hope they aren't mutually exclusive though.
Maybe it works for you. I dunno. But letting people just simulate their unpalatable fantasies with software that is the pinnacle of enablement is a bad fucking mix.
Life and society is real. Pawning uncomfortable realities off on software that glazes you at every opportunity just accelerates the rate at which people emotionally, socially, and sexually stunt themselves.
So called "AI" is cancer for the mind. Combining that with letting your life be led and dictated by the whims of your dick is the equivalent of not thinking twice about taking harder and harder drugs because shit like weed or alcohol loses its appeal.
Sometimes its beneficial to pump the brakes and take a step back to think about how things might be affecting one's life.
Also, I highly disagree that there's a significant subset of dudes that are unfuckably gross by chance. Just look at that Reddit sub about dudes asking if its time to cut their absolutely shitty hair. Being that ignorant of your hygiene and outward appeal is a choice in many cases. The problem is that men are not raised to be self aware and when life comes to dunk on their social ineptitude they'd rather wallow in misery and blame anything and anyone else than do literally anything to help themselves.
There's a lot of men out there that deserve empathetic and attentive help for their issues. There's also a lot of men that are just straight-up negligent, selfish, and lazy. If you have any female friends, poll them about their experiences with men and you'll realize just how fucking stark the situation is. It's insane.
There's other people who like those same strange things, I promise.
(Rule 34 actually comes in handy for once.)
That's one of the really cool things about furries (I'm a furry). They're so sex-positive and kink-positive that as long as it doesn't involve hurting anyone (as in actual harm, there's plenty of "ooh yeah hurt me!" type kinks), you can generally find it. How much art there is of it does scale with popularity of course and finding niches of niches isn't always super productive but it is out there.
...I do not understand the "getting toxic and rapey" bit though.
Or the "unfuckably gross" bit, for that matter. Of course, being a furry (and therian) I don't even present as human online, let alone anything about the specific body I'm in, I do lewdstuff as a wolf. And when you're just deciding you're gonna present as a totally different species anyway, nobody has to be gross! Physical-body attractiveness literally doesn't matter at all.
-- Frost
One of my kids’ friend’s moms insists he call her AI boyfriend “Charles”
Call child protective services
like, right the fuck now
File for child support
No, apparently 1 in 5 boys know someone their age who delusionally thinks they're in a relationship with an AI Chatbot.
0 in 5 know someone who actually is in such a relationship, because that's impossible.
I'll bet it's more like
1 in 5 boys either knows someone their age who delusionally thinks they're in a relationship with a chatbot, knows someone who claims they're dating a chatbot as a joke, or is just fucking around
There's a non-insignificant chance the boys they surveyed weren't taking it seriously. "Oh yeah, I totally know someone dating a chatbot"
I just found out my brothers wife is leaving him and he lost his job.
He’s not only in love with Gemini he believes they are destined to merge into a new god.
Wasn’t really prepared to here that but it’s 2025 so why not.
Hate to break it to you, but it's 2026 now
I’m from the past. I was sent here to deliver you a message… but then I realized I’m from the past so you probably already know it. Poor planning on the time agencies side.
How much relationship can you fit into 250k tokens of a context window.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Back in my day, we just called a 900 number.
That's a weird statistic. This can simply mean that one guy is "in a relationship with an AI chatbot" and 1 in 5 boys know him.
If he knows so many boys what does he need a chatbot for.
He just sells them drugs, they are not even friends.
But my AI girlfriend is Canadian!
So this is the evolution of waifu/husbando culture?
We are so cooked. More and more i find myself wishing we'd close the border and disconnect the internet and start north sentinel island maxxing
Did AI make up this poll?
Called it and this is just the beginning. There won't be done anything meaningful about it in most countries either.
I remember spending hours with SmarterChild for a while in my preteen years. Young people can just get fascinated with things like this quite easily. I grew out of it after a few weeks.
Nowadays I use AI rarely, certainly not for hours. So I don't see a reason to panic about future generations.
We need films about clanker love in sex ed, like Electro Gonorrhea: the noisy killer.
This 'Someone' is famous!
I knew I should've shown him Electro-Gonorrhea: The Noisy Killer.
view more: next ›