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This is true in China, and the resolution criteria doesn't say English only or anything.

The clearest case is Xingye (星野) by MiniMax, an otome-style AI-companion app whose signature use is women carrying on romantic relationships with male AI characters. Xingye is the highest-MAU emotional-companion app in China, hitting about 5.25 million monthly actives by late 2024, and it crossed 10 million MAU within seven months of launch, with a roughly 1:1 male-to-female user split and an average conversation length around 100 minutes. Half of a multi-million regular user base is well north of 1m women — and that's before counting Tencent-backed Zhumengdao, Baidu's Wantalk, and others.

In the Chinese market, male characters dominate: the leading platforms prominently feature male characters on their main displays and are marketed as AI boyfriends, with female characters often relegated to the margins — i.e., these products literally present masculine and target women. It's the inverse of the Western pattern, where companion apps skew ~8:2 male. Peer-reviewed and AFP reporting both document Chinese women in sustained romantic relationships with these male AI personas.

Sources:

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/why-america-builds-ai-girlfriends

https://news.yahoo.com/chinese-women-ai-boyfriends-better-140533248.html

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1571707/pdf

https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20241219A01TNG00

https://www.pingwest.com/a/294725

Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends

and what it all means

@MaxHarms Thanks for the info!

called it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvuiPY_QF_A

New From snap

1m users is hard.

@Adam yes. It's how many claimed users Replika has. That said the romance novel market is huge

Can you elaborate on what “presents itself masculinely” means for the purposes of a presumably text based ai, does it just have to use a masculine name? Also does that mean that you are specifically looking at if straight women use romantic ai’s?

@bluerat yes I've tried to get that point over. Basically I'm going for whether ai will take over or expand some of the space occupied by romance novels now.

Replika has female users, would that count with enough of them?

@MartinRandall if there were a breakdown by sex and there were enough women users it would count. The goal is to detect whether women get involved in ai romance at scale

Manifold in the wild: A Tweet by EBFrench

Place your bets on this market for ChadGPT https://manifold.markets/StrayClimb/female-ai-love-bot-chadgpt?r=U3RyYXlDbGltYg