Gen Alpha boys are solving the rejection problem the only way their generation knows how—with an app. In 2024, one tech investor predicted AI girlfriends would become a $1 billion business. Depressingly, he wasn’t wrong.
A study from Male Allies UK surveyed 1,000 boys aged 12 to 16 and found that 85% have spoken to a chatbot, 20% know a peer who is actively “dating” one, and over a quarter prefer the attention of a bot to an actual human relationship. More than half—58%—said AI relationships are easier because they can “control the conversation.” Yeesh.
The appeal isn’t hard to understand. “AI validates, affirms, never tires, never pushes back,” Nicholas Velotta, head of relationship research at Arya, told the New York Post. “For an adolescent boy still assembling a sense of self, that kind of frictionless attention can feel like intimacy.”
Velotta points to the impossible cultural squeeze these kids are dealing with—told simultaneously to project alpha dominance and to shut up and make space. An AI that welcomes you without judgment starts to look pretty good by comparison.
Gen Alpha Boys Addicted to AI Girlfriends Are Doomed to be Lonely
A May 2025 study found 52% of adolescents use chatbots monthly for social reasons, from practicing conversation starters to navigating romantic situations. Boys are the more vulnerable demographic; they’ve always had fewer culturally sanctioned outlets for emotional expression than girls.
Velotta doesn’t write AI off entirely, though. With intention and guardrails, he sees therapeutic value in it. The issue is that boys are using it as a substitute for human connection rather than a supplement to it. “AI is not a person. It is a sophisticated pattern-matching system calibrated to keep you engaged, and if a boy grows up believing otherwise, he is being set up for a particular kind of loneliness,” he told the Post.
The uncomfortable parts of teenage relationships, the rejection, the miscommunication, the conflict, are also the parts that build you as a person. Velotta’s concern is that boys bypassing all of it won’t just struggle romantically. “A generation that skips that formation doesn’t just struggle to love well. It struggles to work, collaborate, and tolerate being told no.”
