Like many people juggling long hours at work, Chiharu Shimoda sought companionship via a dating app. For two months, he exchanged messages with five or six potential partners, but it wasn’t long before he was seeking out just one — a 24-year-old named Miku. Three months later, they got married. The catch: Miku is an AI bot. And Shimoda knew that from day one.

This obviously isn’t something new that shows up overnight. We already had dating sims and the likes. But with generative AIs, the catch is that of scale and of personalization: not only it is easier to make thousands of virtual partners at a time, each individual virtual partners can be personalized to our liking.

Not even Huxley could have predicted this lol.