It’s definitely not healthy, but this isn’t going to fix the birth rate.
Correlation <> causation meme
This probably won’t fix anything, but hopefully stops it from contributing to the issue further down the line
…meme
Make babies! It’s illegal to be lonely!
And wasn’t China very recently concerned about their birthrate being too high? One Child Policy?
Now they’re already concerned about their birth rate being too low?
The one-child policy was abolished in 2015, but birth rates have continued to decline after that. They currently have one of the world’s lowest fertility rates.
It’s crazy, like overpopulation, stress, and pollution mean people don’t want kids or something.
Well yes, but also no. I think it was only really heavily policed in the 70s and early 80s then was lifted so regional and rural could have a second child (wiki says by '84 the single child policy only impacted 35% of the population). Still goes to show by forcibly dropping birthrates how much it destroys future planning
Still goes to show by forcibly dropping birthrates how much it destroys future planning.
Looking at all the other countries, it may not have had an impact on future birthrates at all.
Looking at all the other countries, it may not have had an impact on future birthrates at all.
Yes, and if they didn’t have the policy in the past, then today’s birth rates would be even more devastating for the demographic
Yeah true regarding birthrates… but I think it probably catapulted median age
This website states that in 1960 median age was around 20 (comparable internationally), median age in 2025 was 42( international was 31)
They were wrong, and they know it, but also nobody’s allowed to say that. Ditto for a bunch of other Mao policies.
You probably joking, but that actually a thing in China and was a thing in USSR
It says that it was proposed… We propose a lot of bills that never pass here in the US. I’m not sure how China’s laws are setup but Wikipedia doesn’t say that it was ever implemented.
6% of income? Still much cheaper than a kid!
Is that your take on the matter? How is wanting yo promote real human relationships between teenagers a bad thing?
This is like trying to solve mental illness by making sickness illegal.
I’d say that’s more like trying to solve mental illness by making it illegal to exploit and profit from it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
Erewhon: or, Over the Range (/ˈɛr.ɛ.hwɒn/, ERR-eh-hwon)[2] is a utopian novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published in 1872,[3] set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society.[4]
In Erewhon, illness is crime and crime is illness. As a result, citizens are imprisoned for offenses like physical ailments, misfortune, or ugliness while those who commit conventional crimes like fraud or theft are seen more sympathetically as exhibiting symptoms of moral afflictions and prescribed sessions with a “straightener” (essentially a psychologist) for treatment.[5]
That is suspiciously close to “Nowhere” spelled backward.
So I guess you’re pretty fine with the pedo/misogynist/nazi/bullying shit happening on Discord servers.
“You hate hotdogs? YOU MUST LOVE BURGERS THEN”
What are you even trying to say?
What do Discord servers have to do with anything??
What does the fact that leaving kids unsupervised can lead to bad shit have to do with the issue at hand?
In this case, we have to look at the parents, how can you be so irresponsable that you need a government and a company to look after YOUR child?
Everything can be true at same time ie that parents need to be more present (what capitalism helps to not be the case), that companies need to be made accountable for what happens in their platforms (what they don’t want), and that governments in the interest of the betterment of all society need to preemptively avoid the worst scenarios of societal unhealthiness (prevention is cheaper than treatment). What I don’t understand is the willingness of Feddit to bend the knees to the man with money’s will instead of accomodate the collective will of all society through State policies.
I’m pretty sure AI partners are not the primary reason people don’t have human partners. The issues are systematic and root very deeply. While I do think AI partners are a very toxic and dangerous way out of this, I highly doubt they were the reason people were single in the first place.
I’m pretty sure alcohol is not the primary reason people don’t drive responsibly. The issues are systematic and root very deeply. While I do think driving while drunk is a very toxic and dangerous way out of this, I highly doubt they were the reason people were ebrious in the first place.
You’re joking, but people drive under influence not because alcohol exists, but because they have issues with self-control and responsibility.
So you do prove a point while trying to oppose it, imo
No, my point is you don’t stop repressing drunk drivers because there are more rooted issues that lead them to drink.
It’s clearly not a healthy thing to exist.
It is the worst of para social relationships, amped up by 100x. And is only going to get more exploitative.
But just on a level of building up the skills to have a relationship, it’s training kids to expect someone who always says yes, always affirms them, will never challenge them to grow…
Relationships are hard. You have to learn to love people and how to do that, and you have to learn to not be selfish, which is the opposite of what LLMs tend to encourage.
Most importantly, you have to love imperfect people. And confront that you are imperfect as well. And thats ok!
mayhaps even use it as a motivation to improve 👉👈
And is only going to get more exploitative.
Oh shit, if you came to see this as an actual loved one, adding a paywall would be legal kidnapping for ransom.
That will fix it.
AI girl/boyfriends are fucking addictions latching onto people vulnerbilities.
This ban is nothing but good, but no one thing will fix child birth rates, nor the reason for the addiction in the first place, I’ll agree with that.
It is funny to me that china can pretend not to be a capitalist nation while displaying every symptom of capitalism.
You can argue that you have capitalism if transactions are happening. Which means the word kind of looses it’s meaning because it’s so broad.
But people will often define it on how much market control the state displays.
You can then argue that China has market control on key aspects of important sectors. Which they do, but still with an approach, that they have private companies with government subsidies.
But most of all, the need for distance to the world capitalism is more a marketing thing. Unless they believe that capitalism is just a tool to achieve socialism, which also can be true.
I would argue a capitalist nation is any one that allows the conversion of natural resources into private (not personal) property by law, and facilitates the exploitation of those resources through a market.
What you’re describing is dirigism at best. They have billionaires bro. They’re capitalist.
Bernie Sanders is more economically left wing than that and he doesn’t even describe himself as a socialist.
Sanders literally describes himself as a democratic socialist but sure.
Dang, I could’ve swore there was something about “he wants social democracy not democratic socialism”, but I guess that was other people describing him.
You can argue it, but you’d be wrong.
You know what else fixes the birth rate? Making life less shitty and giving people enough money to be able to raise children.
In the meantime, negative birth rate is just self-correction of asshole dictatorships. Can’t make money line go up if birth line go down.
Sperm counts are tanking worldwide while PFAS chems are being legalized and clean energy projects are shut down in favor of fossil fuels. Nature doesn’t gaf, and will correct the unhealthy scenario. Humans are not the fittest if they destroy their own species by toxifying the environment. There’s only so much we can do with a sperm count of zero. Even in a handmaid’s tale scenario, a multiple of zero is zero.
I kind of think everywhere probably should, that’s probably the strangest thing it’s like falling in love with a microwave.
Black market GFs that shit is going to be unhinged.
Psst, you looking for some banned waifus?
Good.
this will just spin up a blackmarket waifu market
how the fuck is anyone taking these discussions seriously lmao
At least if more people ended up doing this on their own hardware with open source software, it would cut off a lot of the opportunities it presents for companies to abuse people’s privacy and manipulate them.
Not your hardware, not your girlfriend. Cloud AI only love you for your money.
Yup. At this point, the only sensible model is harm reduction. I’m not happy about where we are, but we do need to be realistic about it.
…for the wrong reason.
“over addiction”
You just chose to read the headline and thought the main reason was child birth. Which is a very concerning fact for alot of societies.
Declining social and economic conditions affect birthrates more than this.
Its a combination of factors and the role AI plays in self care is one of them.
That’s hard to say, at this point. A cheap, always available and completely sycophantic AI seems like it would be hard for a lot of people to resist.
What is clear, is that contraceptives existing is responsible for almost all of the decline since historical times.
Well, we can agree that these AI companions are like drugs. But mentally and physically healthy people statistically tend to resist consuming them. So if these virtual soul mates are so popular, then it clearly shows existence of problems in society.
So, government basically tries to cure the symptoms of a problem rather than curing the causes.
People driving themselves towards reclusivity will reduce social conditions with permanence. Its a good policy.
The point they’re making is this is like banning being wet while the Titanic is sinking, so that you can prevent the Titanic from sinking with this new rule.
Well thats a bad point to try to make. This policy is small and narrow, its not a replacement for improving human conditions economically, and its not trying to be. Its more like a car with slashed tires and a stolen radio. This policy replaces the radio, which isnt the biggest problem, but its still good to fix
I’m a bit confused as to why this is related to 1984. I understand banning AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” could be seen as a form of censorship, though. But I also think it’s kind of a good thing; some people genuinely believed these AI were their real relationships and might avoid any real relationships.
It is a sarcastic observation of the shallow and reductive take that “nineteen eighty four is when the government does something i don’t like!”.
I find it less likely that anyone who uses lemmy would sincerely think it is actually good that people become parasocially addicted to a hallucination box that has been finely tuned to lie to them as convincingly as possible.
However, I admit this inference is doing a lot of gravy lifting; this is, after all, why Poe’s Law exists. There are so very many excessively dim, narrow-minded, and ignorant people who WOULD indeed unironically cry “1984!!” whenever any government does anything that such a person being right here, right now, is always a statistically significant possibility that cannot be dismissed out of hand without risk.
I am giving the person to whom you are replying a generous benefit of a doubt, to be fair…
It was in jest
username checks out
I think a lot of world problems would be solved if these things were encouraged instead. If someone needs their romantic partner to be a mindless sycophant, I would rather them have that with a machine than try to abuse a human person into serving them as would be more traditional. More children being born in situations other than exploitation and manipulation could only be a good thing.
You need to think of human beings as less binary good and binary evil.
I’m sure people who abuse their family members have plenty of good qualities as well. I’m not sure how that’s relevant to what I said.
And for every 1 monster you remove from society by locking them in an AI mind prison, you’ll ruin the lives of a hundred innocent people.
How?
This is the same logic used for child sex dolls and other material consumed by paedophiles
Yeah, sure.
And I wouldn’t be so pissed at Epstein and Trump and the rest of the pedophile class if they were just trafficking sex dolls.
There’s a lot of problems with this, and declining birth rates of the most invasive species on Earth isn’t one of them.
Bro think about Chinese economy please. Economy needs to survive bro… Let go of your imaginery girl bro… Treating your actual girlfriend like human is not mandatory bro… Do it for patriotism bro…
Can’t the AI companies charge more while using the GPU heat to warm the in vitro babies they’re growing in vats?
I’m pretty sure these babies will get lots of love from their AI parents.
this kinda ties in with Tom Murphy’s recent blog post
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2026/06/the-smartphone-hypothesis/
Many moons ago I was too, since women became pikcy looking for the Brad Pitt. Not anymore, not.
