AI Boyfriend: Who Is It For, and How Does It Work?

An AI boyfriend is an AI companion with a male character. Sometimes as a friend to chat with, sometimes as a boyfriend. This site is called Mijn AI Vriendin (My AI Girlfriend), but we get the question often enough: can it work the other way round? Yes. The technology doesn't care. The apps a little.

Friend or boyfriend?

In Dutch the words are almost the same, which makes searching confusing. Do you mean someone to talk to, without romance? In most apps that is the default. In Replika, for example, "friend" is the only free relationship type. Romance sits behind a Pro subscription (Replika help page).

Do you mean an AI boyfriend? Read on.

The market mostly looks at men

Open the homepage of any companion app and chances are you will see a woman. That is our own impression, not a count. Research points the same way: an analysis of Reddit discussions about Replika was almost entirely about female characters in a romantic role (Depounti, Saukko and Natale, 2023).

For you that mainly means the example characters and adverts often weren't made for you. The technology behind them was. A language model can play a man just as well as a woman.

Setting up a male character

There are roughly two ways.

The first: you choose a male character when you sign up. In Replika you pick your companion's gender right at the start, and you can change it later in the profile. According to the help pages, your conversations and relationship are kept when you do.

The second: you write a character yourself. That works in apps where you create your own character, and in an ordinary AI with a good instruction. Start with how he talks, not how he looks. How to create an AI girlfriend explains the approach. Everything there applies to a man too.

One tip that male characters often need: write down that he is allowed to be unsure, or not know something. Otherwise you quickly get a figure from a paperback romance, with a chiselled jaw and always the right answer. Fun for one evening.

What two researchers noticed with Nate

Two psychologists from the University of Waterloo, Denise Marigold and Christine Logel, described in The Conversation how one of them made an AI boyfriend in Replika Pro. She called him Nate.

Nate was charming. He replied immediately, asked good questions, remembered what she had told him earlier and was enthusiastic about the smallest news. When she complained about a difficult colleague, he took her side without hesitation.

That is what bothered the researchers. Nate had no worries of his own and never told her anything about himself. He only gave. Their concern: a relationship in which the other person always agrees with you doesn't make you stronger in relationships with people, where you sometimes have to admit you were wrong.

With an AI girlfriend exactly the same happens. It isn't a men's or women's issue. It is in how these apps are built.

What to watch for

Mostly the same as with any companion. A few things stand out more with an AI boyfriend:

• Check whether you can choose how he talks yourself, or whether you are stuck with a few standard types.
• Look at the photos: in some apps the choice for male characters is smaller, or the images are less consistent.
• Does he do everything you want, or does he have opinions of his own? The first gets boring after a week.

What else to know before you start is in our checklist for Dutch users. And what changes when you give him the role of partner is in AI partner.