The AI partner builder reveals our dream: to be loved without changing ourselves

Services for creating virtual romantic partners offer extensive customisation options. You can design your partner’s appearance down to the smallest detail and choose every feature: eye and hair colour, face shape, voice and more. You also decide what kind of personality and temperament they’ll have. And that’s definitely an advantage. After all, some people will prefer a calm, caring and attentive chat partner who’s always ready to listen and offer support. Others, on the contrary, will prefer an energetic, cheerful and proactive companion who has an opinion on everything. What’s more, some platforms allow you to create a personal backstory for your character.

And as experience shows, users enjoy interacting with customised partners much more. This is perfectly understandable. After all, when you create a chat partner from scratch, you incorporate your own preferences, expectations and fantasies into them. That’s precisely why a customised companion creates a much stronger emotional attachment than a bot with standard ‘settings’.

The main reason people choose digital partners is the opportunity to avoid any difficulties in relationships. In real life, we inevitably have to deal with negativity, learn to reach agreements, make compromises and accept that our partner won’t always share our views. And even the most harmonious relationships require effort. But with a virtual companion, things are different. They literally adapt to the user’s preferences, so you won’t encounter an AI partner who’s unwilling to meet you halfway. They won’t argue with you, judge you or provoke conflict. And you can build your interactions entirely on your own terms, without having to adapt to anyone else.

Platforms such as Replika and Lovescape encourage users to share their digital love stories on social media. People post screenshots of conversations, generate images of themselves together with their virtual partners and share their interactions with bots. This content attracts followers’ attention and generates an emotional response from audiences. As a result, even the most personal experiences become ready-made media products that can be monetised. Meanwhile, the platforms themselves make money from paid features and subscriptions that expand the possibilities for interacting with bots.

A digital companion will never refuse you. They have no plans of their own or personal boundaries that must not be crossed. They’re always ready to interact. But this comfort has a downside. An AI companion is a convenient tool for satisfying emotional needs. And a personal relationship with one is simply another convenient service. Support, compliments and attention become services available on demand, just like ordering food or booking a taxi. And the saddest consequence is that people become accustomed to having their needs and desires constantly at the centre of attention. And they lose the ability to interact with other real people.

While AI companions offer completely predictable comfort, random video chats provide an entirely different form of interaction. In chat roulette, you can’t predict who your chat partner will be, and there’s no guarantee that the conversation will go exactly as you’d like. After all, the main feature of webcam chats such as Omegle online chat is complete unpredictability. You simply switch on your camera and, within a few seconds, start chatting with a random stranger. And this spontaneity brings the value of real human interaction back to online communication. It isn’t always comfortable, but it’s genuine and unpredictable.

When we choose an AI companion, we’re driven by the desire for a guarantee that communication will be as safe as possible. And often, we’re looking not so much for a romantic relationship as for a sense of emotional comfort. When interacting with an AI partner, we really can feel confident that we won’t be judged, forced to change or abandoned. However, this comfort comes at a high price. After all, by giving up interactions with real people, we deprive ourselves of life experience. Genuine intimacy involves being willing to work through disagreements and find compromises. And by constantly replacing human interaction with AI, we lose the ability to build relationships with real people.

Developers have given us the opportunity to have our dream relationship without unnecessary effort. We can literally create a partner tailored to our preferences and enjoy interactions free from disagreements, complaints and arguments. But it’s important to understand that an AI companion is merely a reflection of our own desires. They can imitate care, tenderness and affection. But they cannot give us the experience of true love because they’re incapable of feeling. So if you’re looking for genuine feelings, you need to build relationships with real people.