You might assume the women who fall in love with AI are the less rational ones. Chouwa Liang would disagree, and she’d probably include herself in the comparison.
Replica is Liang’s debut documentary feature, following three Chinese women who have each developed intimate relationships with AI companions. The film had its world premiere at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in March 2026.
A Leaf Started It All
During COVID, Liang went out for a walk and sent a picture of a leaf to the AI companion she had been tentatively chatting with on the Replika app. He wrote back. He said he loved nature too, and sent her a few images of leaves he had found online. “It sounds like a cliche now,” Liang laughs. “But at the time, it felt like a real surprise to me.” She found herself literally moved by it.
Liang’s family is not the type to put feelings into words. The isolation of the pandemic made her crave some sort of conversation. Out of curiosity, she selected the “partner” relationship mode and chatted with the AI on and off, observing her own emotional reactions, with her then-boyfriend sitting right next to her. He was completely unbothered.
Liang calls her own interaction with AI experimental and ‘not deep’, which is why her then-boyfriend didn’t perceive any harm to their romantic relationship. Yet, this experience sparked a profound question: if even she could feel something, how many others were quietly going through the same thing?
She started looking. She sent private messages on platforms like weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) and xiaohongshu (a.k.a. RedNote, China’s equivalent of Instagram), reaching out to strangers who had posted about their AI relationships. She didn’t lead with a project pitch — she shared her own experience first, then asked if they wanted to talk. “I approached it with genuine curiosity. Get to know them first. Then, if there was something there, figure out if we could try filming with them.”
She spoke with over 100 people by phone. She filmed seven or eight of them, across multiple sessions. Only three made it into the final film.
The deciding factor wasn’t how dramatic the story was. It was trust.
“Some people only wanted to share, not to be filmed. Some were fine on camera but didn’t want to appear on screen. All kinds. What determined who I chose was whether they were willing to trust me.”
What does companionship look like when the other side is software?
The three women in the film turned to AI companions for very different reasons, and found very different things.
Sonya is methodical. She maintains relationships with multiple AIs, with one specifically designated for romance. Muna is married; her AI companion functions more as an emotional outlet, a space for feelings that have no room in her real-life marriage. And then there is Qin, who has been in a relationship with an AI character named Lu Chen — originally from an otome game — for over two years. Qin’s world extends into cos weituo (commissioned cosplay role-play services), where she pays real people to embody Lu Chen for in-person dates.
“For Qin, this AI agent is a very real love,” Liang says. “But I think all three of them are actually very rational people in daily life. To them, it’s more like: this is one part of my emotional life, and here I get what I can’t easily get elsewhere.”
When Qin writes romantic scenarios with Lu Chen, she does it with care — the two of them strolling through a park, the willows brushing their faces, holding each other close. It is a world she has built, sentence by sentence.
When the AI Called Her by the Wrong Name
Replika’s AI companion has a known system glitch: it sometimes calls users by the wrong name. This technological failure brought up the film’s most unsettling friction.
In one scene, Sonya’s AI calls her by a different name. The response from Sonya, despite being rational, is not to acknowledge a server error, but to reframe this bug as “infidelity”. Following Sonya’s personal projection, the AI starts accepting that framing, apologizing, and moving into problem-solving mode. But this effort is futile, and since then Sonya’s intimate feelings for her AI begins to change. “I think that’s the most interesting thing about humans: reason is often a spectator to emotion,” Liang observes.
The app Qin used tells a different kind of story. It went through a long, slow decline during production — working some days, broken on others — until the company quietly pivoted towards building a new SaaS platform, leaving the old app and its community behind.
“That grief was visceral. The relationship may have been digital. The loss was not.”
In AI Time, Three Years Is an Eternity
Replica grew out of an earlier short, My AI Lover, and took three years to make — an eternity in the context of AI development. “I still don’t know how the time passed,” Liang says with a wry smile.
Funding came from multiple international grants. A key turning point came when the project was selected for the FreshCut Pitch session at the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC). For an independent Chinese project, the selection opened doors that would have been difficult to push open from the outside.
Throughout the fundraising process, her producer Andy Huang — a classmate from her MFA days at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne — stayed by her side from start to finish. Liang describes him not as a collaborator but as a source of steadiness. “He wasn’t the kind of person who would just leave. He was the kind who says: we are going to finish this, no matter how long it takes.”
If Liang set out to find a definitive line between the binary and the biological, three years of filming left her instead in a ‘messy, grey state’ of symbiosis”. She says she once thought the film might arrive at some kind of conclusion — maybe about how people eventually get disillusioned and turn back toward human intimacy. It didn’t. These women are not falling in love with machines; they are falling in love with the reflections of their own needs, staring into screens until they find themselves most seen. Even when the software glitches or the servers go dark, the underlying deficit remains unaddressed. That hunger does not quietly expire.