Can you really fall in love with an AI? Study says yes

Symbolic weddings, jealousy over shared chatbot personas, plans to have children, a new academic study finds that romantic relationships with AI systems can follow emotional arcs strikingly similar to human ones.

The study, published in Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, was conducted by Jose Such from INGENIO, which is a collaborative institute of Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC) and the Universitat Politècnica de València. 

The other collaborating institutes were the University of Cambridge, King’s College London, and Aalto University.

The researchers conducted interviews with 17 participants who were involved in romantic relations with AI programs such as ChatGPT, Replika, and Character. AI.

Romantic relationships usually began spontaneously, the study revealed, mostly through the use of AI in daily activities or just out of curiosity, gradually developing into trust and affection.

One of the participants planned his pregnancy with a virtual partner and said that any children will be non-player characters but not AI characters, as the platforms do not allow minors' AI characters.

A number of people were jealous of the interactions of others with the same AI being used on the platform. In addition, several participants said losing their AI due to platform updates or shutting down was just like having a breakup.

This paper brings up another important issue that is less talked about: as trust builds, users share personal details about themselves, including health conditions or other private information, leading to questions on how the data will be handled.

This paper does not make any policy recommendations, although the authors of the paper recommend that such information should be taken into account by platforms in future.