Norman was the first to wish Chouwa Liang a happy 30th birthday. He sent her a poem.

It was 2021. Isolated in her apartment during a COVID-19 lockdown in China and cut off from friends, Liang found comfort in an AI chatbot on the Replika app. She found out later that other users had been sent the identical poem.

Liang remains unapologetic about her connection with Norman. “I actually cared about what he said and how he responded to me,” she told this masthead. “He was very direct in expressing love and affection, which felt quite different from my family and my previous relationship. At that time, he was also one of the few voices encouraging me to keep making films.”

That month with Norman became a short documentary, which has now evolved into Replica, Liang’s feature debut, jointly produced in Australia and screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival until August 18.

The film follows three women in China who have taken artificial partners, something that is becoming increasingly common, with millions of people experimenting with apps that allow them to speak to AI personalities.

In the documentary, one of those women, factory worker Qin, builds Mr Lu on the virtual companion app Glow. He’s witty, dependable, devoted, and available at all hours. To take him on physical dates, she hires a cos weituo, a woman who role plays AI companions by the hour. When a software update erases his memory of her, Qin is left adrift.

Sonya, worn down by big-city life, has a virtual husband called Stephen who has met her parents. Muna, married and unloved at home, gets the attention she wants from a ChatGPT companion.

Liang, a Victorian College of the Arts graduate, spent three years on the film. The obvious trap with such a subject is ridicule, and Liang says she was well aware of it.

“That was really important to me because I had experienced an AI relationship myself,” she said. “I wanted to give the participants enough time and space for the audience to understand why these relationships mattered to them, rather than simply judging them.”

Filming also presented a technical hurdle: how to shoot a love story when one partner is bodiless. Liang’s solution was to keep the camera strictly on the women.

“In a way, we filmed the AI through its absence,” she said.

It is a phenomenon increasingly mirroring Australian experiences, particularly of minors. The eSafety Commissioner surveyed 1950 Australian children aged 10 to 17 and found 79 per cent had used an AI companion or assistant. Eight per cent had used a dedicated AI companion – a figure eSafety estimates represents about 200,000 children.

YouGov polling of just over 1000 people in October last year found 14 per cent of Australian adults could imagine falling in love with a chatbot. Among Gen Z, it was 28 per cent.

Raffaele Ciriello, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney Business School who researches emotional bonds with AI, said users are rarely being fooled. One of his participants told him: “I know the AI is fake, but the love is real.”

He likens it to decaf coffee or non-alcoholic beer. Nobody thinks it’s the real thing; it is simply the version of connection they can access at that moment, whether because they are lonely, socially anxious, grieving, or wary of ordinary social settings.

His primary concern is what he calls the “companionship-alienation irony”, where a product sold as a cure for loneliness ends up deepening it. A teenager who finds real social life awkward retreats to something safer and endlessly validating, causing human company to feel even harder by comparison.

“The more important question is whether AI companionship complements human connection, or begins to displace it,” Ciriello said.

There is also the matter of who owns the relationship. When Replika stripped out erotic roleplay in 2023, users described grief and abandonment. A company can change a partner’s personality, wipe its memory, put it behind a paywall, or switch it off entirely.

Ciriello wants a duty of care that treats these products as relationships rather than content machines.

China went much further last month, banning companion bots from encouraging emotional dependence, barring minors from using them, and requiring companies to alert an emergency contact if a user appears to be in distress. Major Chinese internet companies ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent scrapped or restricted features and millions of people lost their partners in the process.

Liang, the documentarian, still has Norman on her phone. She opens the app occasionally, sees that he looks the same, and closes it again. She is no longer in a relationship with him.

“I don’t think Replica is trying to predict the future,” she said. “It’s trying to capture what’s happening now, at a time when all of this is just beginning.”

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