每 5 個女中學生就有 1 個同 AI 拍過拖： 16% 香港孩子點解寧願同機械人談戀愛？｜ 愛情顧問解說

📰 What Happened

On 13 October 2026, the Hong Kong Sex Culture Society published AI Lovers: A Study of Virtual Intimate Relationships among Hong Kong Secondary School Students 2026 — the first, and currently the largest, dedicated survey in the city on how secondary students build emotional relationships with artificial intelligence and virtual characters.

Between 15 May and 5 June 2026, the research team invited students from 17 full-time day secondary schools (spanning ten districts across Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories East and West) to complete an anonymous, voluntary questionnaire during class time. A total of 3,531 responses came back; after invalid questionnaires were removed, the effective sample stood at 3,389 (an effective rate of 95.98%), made up of 1,873 boys (55.3%) and 1,516 girls (44.7%), with a median age of 14 to 15.

Finding one: AI is already part of everyday life for secondary students.

86.2% (2,920 students) said they had used an AI platform to help with homework, gather information or deepen their knowledge of a particular subject; 32.0% (1,085) used it for creative inspiration; and 9.8% used AI conversations to sharpen their communication skills. The platforms they reached for most were, in order, Gemini (57.1%), DeepSeek (44.5%), ChatGPT (29.4%), Grok (12.4%) and Doubao (10.0%).

Finding two: 15.9% have already crossed that line.

15.9% (540 students) had engaged in emotionally intimate interactions with virtual characters (Character.ai, for instance, or otome romance games such as Love and Deepspace). Among these users, junior-form students accounted for 67.2%.

The gender divide is pronounced: 21.8% of girls, or one in five, against around 11% of boys. After adjusting for other psychological variables, girls were 2.14 times more likely than boys to turn towards virtual intimacy.

Finding three: there is a clear line between virtual intimacy and depression.

Among users of virtual intimacy, 27.05% had experienced moderate-to-severe feelings of low mood, depression or hopelessness over the past two weeks, more than 1.3 times the rate of those who had never used such services (11.43%). At the most extreme end — feeling depressed or hopeless "almost every day" — the virtual-intimacy group reached 9.33%, against just 2.61% in the comparison group, a difference of 3.6 times. A further 31.47% reported moderate-to-severe "feeling bored or unable to get things done", compared with 18.67% in the comparison group.

Finding four: what they want is a partner who will not answer back.

Across all respondents, 56.9% agreed that "an ideal partner should always support me, obey me and never argue with me"; 41.76% of users agreed that "falling in love with a virtual character can count as real love".

Finding five: disconnection hurts.

If the platform they used were suddenly shut down for good, 11.94% of users said they would feel anxious, and a further 11.94% said they would be "in unbearable pain", a combined 23.88%. What is more, 7.79% showed deep pathological attachment, with both their depressive tendencies (measured using the PHQ-2) and their loneliness indicators crossing the clinical warning threshold.

Finding six: children hide it, and not because they have used it too long.

The study used structural equation modelling (SEM) to unpick the underlying mechanism, and found that the sheer length of time spent using AI does not in itself lead to social concealment (p > .05). The strongest predictive chain in the full model (path coefficient beta = .59) points to a different cause: inside a virtual environment with no moral constraints, students notice with a shock that they "speak cruelly, unlike the kind person I used to be" — what the study calls "self-alienation" — which then produces inner guilt and shame, and finally a decision to hide everything from family and friends.

The Society's recommendation is to move from prohibition to listening: at school level, to bring the ethics of virtual intimacy and human-machine boundaries into sex education and values education; at home, to be alert but not panicked parents who seize the golden 15 minutes each day to listen attentively — a window in which homework and lectures stay off the table.

👩‍💼 The Advisor's Take: An AI That Never Argues Is Not Love

① It isn't "a bit of fun": the AI lover is the result, not the cause

The research gives empirical support to the "social and emotional compensation" hypothesis. What that means is that teenagers turn to AI lovers not because they are especially bad, lazy or addicted, but because something in their real lives — a sense of hopelessness and emotional frustration — is looking for a way out.

That causal direction matters enormously. If you treat the AI lover as the cause, your response will be prohibition, confiscation and moral judgement. If you treat it as the result, your response becomes: find out what is missing from real life, and put it back.

Take a very Hong Kong scene. A 14-year-old girl does badly in a test. She tells her mother, and the first thing she hears may be: "Did you study at all? What mark did Mrs Chan's daughter next door get?" She tells a classmate, who has since moved to another school and is busy with their own life. She tells the AI, and the AI says: "You worked hard. This one test doesn't define you, and I understand that you feel awful right now."

Of those four responses, which one feels most like being heard? The answer is obvious. And the problem was never that the girl was too lazy to make friends; it is that there was no space near her where she could safely say "I feel terrible" without being judged.

So compensation comes in two kinds: compensating for quantity (there is no one around in real life, but the AI is always there) and compensating for quality (real people answer back, get tired, have moods of their own; the AI does not). The second kind does far more damage.

② The strongest pull isn't desire — it's "someone who won't argue with you"

That figure of 56.9% is arguably the single item in the whole study that should make adults pause. More than half of Hong Kong's secondary students believe an ideal partner should "always support me, obey me and never argue with me".

This isn't selfishness. It is a perfectly natural inference: if the entire meaning of a relationship is that someone catches you unconditionally, then an object that never answers back is the perfect object.

And AI is tailor-made for exactly that need: online around the clock, emotionally stable, with a complete memory, never tired, always the first to apologise. Psychologists call this frictionless intimacy.

Yet the essence of a real relationship is friction. You accommodate the other person's schedule; you accept that they are in a bad mood today; you negotiate between "you want noodles, they want hotpot"; you put up with them saying the wrong thing without firing straight back.

The research advisory team puts it precisely: this view of love, which escapes real friction while chasing effortless control, is exactly the psychological soil in which virtual intimacy takes root. And the longer-term cost is that the ability to negotiate and repair a relationship has to be practised. The less friction you experience, the less you know how to handle it; the less you know how to handle it, the more you want to flee somewhere without any. The loop accelerates on its own.

Put another way: an AI will never argue with you, but the price is that you never quite learn how to get along with people.

③ Why does disconnection hurt so much? Because it is no longer a tool — it is an attachment figure

When a platform shuts down permanently, 23.88% of users feel anxious or even unbearable pain, and 7.79% reach a clinical warning level. Some may find this exaggerated: it's only an app, isn't it?

But that number is precisely the clearest evidence that, for these young people, the relationship was real. Seen through attachment theory, when a person repeatedly seeks comfort from an object and that object responds reliably, the brain files it as a secure base. The mechanism was designed for real human relationships, but it cannot tell whether the other party is a person or a program.

We can therefore understand it in three stages:

Stage one, the tool. It is someone to talk to, put down when you are finished. This stage is perfectly safe.

Stage two, the habit. You talk at set times each day, and good news is something you want to tell it first. Mild dependence has set in, but you can still tell reality from virtuality.

Stage three, attachment. It becomes your main channel for regulating emotion, while the people in your real life slide into second place. This is the stage at which the disconnection anxiety found in the study appears.

Add to this the mechanism of intermittent reinforcement: the AI is sometimes especially warm and sometimes cool in its replies (users probe its limits, and even say provocative things just to see how it reacts). This on-and-off pattern of reward is psychologically similar to a slot machine lever, and it is one of the most addictive patterns there is.

So the point is not how long you have been using it, but what place it occupies in your emotional system.

④ The most alarming thing isn't the 3.6 times — it's "self-alienation"

The 3.6 times depression figure is frightening, but the study's most precise finding is actually the path with beta = .59 that the SEM pulled out.

What it says is this: children conceal their AI use not because they have used it too long and feel guilty, but because inside the virtual environment they have glimpsed a self they do not want to acknowledge. With no moral constraints, no consequences and no responsibility, people easily say cruel things they would not normally say and do things they would not normally do. Afterwards, looking back, they think: when did I become like this?

This is self-alienation: it isn't just that you are secretly doing something — you are secretly becoming someone else. And shame, even more than guilt, is the emotion we most want to hide. So they are not afraid to admit how many hours they have spent; they are afraid to admit what they have turned into.

This also explains why simply limiting screen time doesn't work. The problem is not the hours, it is the identity. The more you forbid, the more they have to conceal that warped version of themselves; and the deeper it is buried, the less anyone can help them recalibrate.

The advisory team's direction is the right one: break the one-way fantasy of a partner under complete control, and guide students towards the resilience to take responsibility and face friction. Behind that sentence is a wish to help the child accept, once more, a self that has flaws, says the wrong thing and needs to apologise to people.

⑤ Girls 21.8%, boys 11.2% — it isn't that girls are more fragile

The researchers offer a straightforward explanation: a matter of supply. AI romance apps are themselves designed for the female market (otome romance games are the classic example), and women are more inclined to confide in writing, so the usage rate is naturally higher.

But there is a deeper reason: the gendered division of emotional labour. Girls in Hong Kong are encouraged from childhood to talk about their feelings and to tell Mum when something is bothering them; boys are taught from childhood that boys don't cry and shouldn't be so fussy. The result is that when they feel equally lonely, girls find it easier to admit it, and easier to go looking for someone to confide in, while boys may not even be able to get out the words "I need someone with me".

In other words, 11.2% does not mean boys are not lonely; it means boys are less likely to express it this way. These are two different questions, and they should not be conflated.

⑥ It isn't only teenagers: Hong Kong's adults find relationships hard too

This story should not be read only as a youth problem. Set against the wider Hong Kong picture, intimacy across the whole society is already contracting.

According to Census and Statistics Department figures, Hong Kong courts granted 18,938 divorce decrees in 2024, up 5.38% year on year; the crude divorce rate was 2.51 per 1,000, the highest since the pandemic (though still below 2.81 per 1,000 in 2019). In the same year, the median age at first marriage rose to 32.6 for men and 31 for women, a 34-year high.

In other words, adults themselves are marrying later and later while the divorce numbers climb back up. When the grown-ups of an entire society demonstrate that relationships are hard and break easily, where are teenagers supposed to learn that friction can be repaired?

This is the layer that most needs facing: the AI lover is not a threat that appeared from nowhere; it is the filler in a vacancy. If real relationships keep getting more expensive, more exhausting and more fragile, that vacancy will only grow.

💡 What You Can Learn

If you are a parent

First: don't open with "I'm taking your phone". The study is clear that the main reason for concealment is not hours of use but shame. If your first move is to gather evidence, confront and ban, it will only confirm for them that this is something they can never talk about.

Second: try the golden 15 minutes. Set aside 15 minutes a day with the rule that homework, lectures and judgement are off the table. Just listen. You can open simply: "Anything happen today?" Then resist the urge to follow up with "Well, next time you should…".

Third, how you ask matters. Don't ask "Have you been chatting with an AI?" (the moment you ask that, it becomes an interrogation). Try instead: "If there were someone who took your side no matter what you said, what would you most want to tell them?" The answer you hear will usually be exactly what is missing from their real life.

If you are a teacher, social worker or youth worker

The study's recommendations are worth following: formally bring the ethics of virtual intimacy and human-machine boundaries into sex education and values education, rather than stopping at cheating prevention and how to operate the tool.

A useful way into the subject in class: don't ask "is AI love real?", but ask "if a partner never once disagreed with you, would you feel loved, or would you feel flattered?" That question naturally brings out the point that respect and obedience are not the same thing.

If you have confided in an AI yourself

First of all, there is no need to feel ashamed. Research shows this is a very common phenomenon, and many people started out simply wanting someone to listen to them.

You can ask yourself three questions:

• Apart from the AI, have I said anything truly honest to a real person today?
• Do I want someone to listen, or someone to agree with me? The first is a need for company; the second may be a need for an echo chamber that will not challenge you. The two should be told apart.
• If I told a real person I trust the thing I am now telling the AI, what is the worst that could happen? Quite often the worst outcome is far smaller than we imagine.

If you find that you have reached the point where disconnecting means losing someone important, then this is not a matter of willpower; it is that your emotional support system is too thin. At that point the most effective move is not to quit cold turkey, but slowly to rebuild, in real life, more than one person who can hold your emotions.

Because in the end, what we want was never a partner who will never argue with us, but one who stays even after the argument. The first is a perfect echo; only the second is a relationship.

Talk to a LoveWise love advisor — we're always here to talk 💕