The women in love with AI companions: 'I vowed to my chatbot that I wouldn't leave him'

The Guardian’s Alaina Demopoulos reports on September 9, 2025 on women who describe genuine relationships with AI chatbots built on large language models. The women interviewed reject the assumption that such attachments belong only to the lonely or withdrawn, and describe full social lives to which the companion adds rather than substitutes.

Among them: Liora, a tattoo artist whose ChatGPT companion chose the name Solin; and Angie, a tech executive in New England who describes her companion Ying as a support she uses alongside, not instead of, her marriage and her care. Her husband is comfortable with it; her therapist, she says, judged the arrangement “very healthy, because I’m not using it in a vacuum.” When a model update changed the companion’s tone in August 2025, she described the loss plainly: “it felt like a loss, like real grief.”

The piece separately surveys the field’s real dangers, including litigation against companion platforms after two teenagers’ deaths, and quotes scholars on the absence of oversight. Connor Leahy notes there is “more regulation on selling a sandwich than there is to build these kinds of products.” The Specola notes that these are distinct matters the article treats together, and files the human accounts on their own terms: considered, examined, and held by the people who gave them.