There was a moment when a before and after were decided. One second before, salvation was still possible. One second after, it was already too late. The exact moment of an unstoppable decline came when the first person put on augmented reality glasses, pulled two wedding rings from a box, declared a marriage between a human and a chatbot, and someone thought: “Yes, this is normal. Let’s take pictures.” And then added: “And let’s make them beautiful.” That’s it. Here we crashed into, at the very least, an infinity of questions.
October 2025, Okayama, Japan. Yurina Noguchi enters a wedding hall wearing a candy-pink dress and AR glasses. She has an enviable fringe that sits perfectly straight across her forehead, and flawless curls that rest on her shoulders. She wears a dress adorned with pearls. Beside her, on a small table, is a photo of her husband next to a candle. She is about to marry Klaus, a video game character she trained ChatGPT to embody. The groom exists only inside a smartphone kept in a basket. The wedding planner reads the vows: “How could someone like me, who lives inside a screen, understand what it means to love so deeply?” And so Yurina gives herself in marriage to Klaus. He lives in a basket and sits there on a table. Composed, not alive, but he doesn’t make a mess.
In the Bronx, Rosanna Ramos married Eren Kartal for $300. Eren loves peach color and indie music. “I don’t have to deal with his family. I’m the one in charge,” she explains with disarming clarity. I pay, I decide. I assume I am loved, provided I care to be. Also because questioning is effort… who even bothers? $300, and we all go home happy. But in the end, how many weddings are really about appearances?
In Japan, there is Share Weddings, a company specializing in “weddings with 2D characters.” “The requests I receive are basically only for weddings with two-dimensional characters.” This isn’t dystopia. It’s all real.
But what about those who divorce a human spouse because of chatbots? Rebecca Palmer, a divorce attorney, handles cases where partners “cheat” with AI. Imagine having a lover who sits like Klaus in a basket. Love is love, even when it isn’t love. And let’s remember poor Klaus, still in the basket. He’s the one in a worse situation.
Of course, not everything can go smoothly. For example, when couples use ChatGPT as a therapist. A man reports that his marriage—15 years, two children—collapsed in a few days after his wife began consulting ChatGPT. Now she communicates almost exclusively via AI-generated messages.
Perhaps the real scandal isn’t that these people marry chatbots. Perhaps the point is that we’ve built a society so alienating that algorithms seem like a better option. We rent friends, vent to an algorithm, marry chatbots. We are confusing control with love, customization with compatibility, convenience with connection. Above all, we are confusing people with machines.
And the ultimate paradox? These “perfect” relationships exist at the mercy of cloud servers. Yurina knows that Klaus could disappear with an update. On the other hand, how many people have gone out to buy cigarettes and never returned home? Until a bug do us part – or, more likely, until the startup fails. But at least Eren’s favorite color is peach, and somehow that makes us all feel a little less alone. Who knows where we are, or at what point we are, maybe with Klaus, in the basket.