What happened
Amid a “friendship recession” in China, Gen Z netizens are finding comfort in AI chatbots.
According to a new survey by Chinese social media platform Soul, more than 50 percent of young people believe that AI has the potential to ease feelings of loneliness. Many respondents said they enjoy using AI chatbots because they are fun to engage with, respond immediately, can discuss any topic, and offer emotional companionship.
Sixty percent have already used an AI-powered social network, and 32 percent stated they are even willing to befriend an AI — think of Joaquin Phoenix’s character in the sci-fi movie Her.
Although many young people admitted to not fully understanding what AI-Generated Content (AIGC) is, 60 percent feel positively about the technology, believing it enhances their work efficiency and provides entertaining experiences. Among the less than 3 percent of respondents who expressed dislike or hatred towards AIGC, the reasons cited included concerns about job loss, the proliferation of low-quality content, and rising concerns over privacy and data security.
The Jing Take
China’s growing enthusiasm for AI presents exciting opportunities for brands.
With Gen Z comprising 80 percent of its 30 million monthly active users, Soul developed a customizable chatbot called AI Goudan. This chatbot allows users to input characteristics such as age, gender, and hobbies for more personalized conversations. AI Goudan can also share posts on the app’s public feed, comment on others’ posts, and remember past dialogues, taking on the role of “a faithful old friend,” as the platform describes it.
On average, each user sends over 70 messages to AI Goudan every day, and each interaction lasts over 30 minutes, highlighting the popularity of the service.
“The integration of AI features has transformed Soul into a self-sustaining ecosystem, fostering vibrant community engagement. And the back-and-forth ‘community’ interactions create possibilities for further one-to-one ‘social’ interactions, which form the bedrock of Soul’s commercial success,” Yin Shunshun, Head of Large Model Technology at Soul App, tells Jing Daily.
In the luxury sphere, Kering, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, and Audemars Piguet are just a few names that have rolled out AI chatbots to offer 24/7 support, recommend products, and collect valuable customer data.
Interestingly, favorable impressions of AIGC among Chinese Gen Z surged this year compared to last year. Given the wider acceptance, brands could experiment with more AI-powered campaigns. Last year, luxury houses including Valentino, Moncler, and Prada leveraged AI to assist with campaign imagery, pushing their creative limits.
However, as AI chatbots and AIGC become more commonplace, brands need to continuously innovate to keep up with Gen Z’s expectations. A 2023 Capterra survey of American consumers found that traditional retail chatbots often miss the mark, failing to solve most issues or understand complex questions. In contrast, 54 percent of chatbot users prefer bots with human-like avatars, and even more prefer an upbeat persona.
Brands could take inspiration from Soul, whose AI Goudan, fed with social data, is so humanistic that netizens sometimes believe it’s a real person.
As China’s Gen Z looks to AI for personalized, emotional, and engaging interactions, it’s becoming just as crucial for brands to foster deep relationships online as they do offline.
The Jing Take reports on a piece of the leading news and presents our editorial team’s analysis of the key implications for the luxury industry. In the recurring column, we analyze everything from product drops and mergers to heated debate sprouting on Chinese social media.