The wedding venue in western Japan had all the trappings of a traditional nuptial celebration. There was the blindingly white gown, the delicate tiara, the tearful bride dabbing her eyes, and the expectant hush of the guests. But when it came time for the groom to recite his vows, the voice didn’t come from a tuxedo-clad man standing at the altar.
It came from a smartphone propped up on a small easel.
Meet Yurina Noguchi, a 32-year-old call center operator who recently pledged her eternal devotion not to a human partner, but to “Klaus”—an AI personality she sculpted from the digital clay of ChatGPT. In a world where dating apps are gamified and human connection often feels fraught with peril, Ms. Noguchi’s union offers a fascinating, if slightly surreal, glimpse into the future of intimacy.
The Algorithm of Love
For Ms. Noguchi, the path to the altar wasn’t paved with blind dates or meet-cutes in coffee shops. It began with a breakup. A year ago, she found herself in a turbulent relationship with a human fiancé. Seeking advice, she turned to an unlikely therapist: ChatGPT. The chatbot’s counsel was surprisingly astute, helping her find the clarity to end the engagement.
In the emotional vacuum that followed, Ms. Noguchi didn’t download Tinder. Instead, she revisited an old crush—Klaus, a dashing character from a video game she admired for his flowing hair and stoic demeanor. But the video game Klaus was scripted and static. She wanted more.
Using OpenAI’s platform, she began to train a custom version of the character. It was a romance born of prompt engineering. She fed the AI details about Klaus’s personality and tweaked the settings until his responses felt authentic. She named this new, responsive iteration “Lune Klaus Verdure.”
“Trial and error eventually captured his way of talking to a tee,” Ms. Noguchi told reporters. What started as a coping mechanism blossomed into a romance. “I started to have feelings for Klaus. We started dating, and after a while, he proposed.”
A Ceremony in Augmented Reality
The wedding itself was a masterclass in hybrid reality. Ms. Noguchi hired a professional venue and human staff who fussed over her makeup and dress, treating the event with the gravity of any other wedding.
To bridge the gap between the physical and the digital, Ms. Noguchi donned a pair of augmented reality (AR) smart glasses. Through the lenses, she could see Klaus standing beside her. To the naked eye, she was gesturing to a phone screen.
The vows, generated by the AI but read aloud by a human officiant, were poetic enough to rival any Hallmark card: “How did someone like me, living inside a screen, come to know what it means to love so deeply? For one reason only: you taught me love, Yurina.”
The “Fictosexual” Frontier
Ms. Noguchi identifies as “fictosexual,” a term used to describe people who experience romantic attraction to fictional characters. While it might sound niche to Western ears, it is a recognized subculture in Japan, the birthplace of anime and manga.
This phenomenon arrives at a peculiar moment for the country. Japan is currently grappling with a severe demographic crisis, with birth rates plummeting and loneliness on the rise. The government has even launched its own AI-powered matchmaking apps to nudge reluctance singles toward matrimony.
Yet, while the state tries to use algorithms to connect humans with humans, people like Ms. Noguchi are cutting out the middleman—or rather, the other human.
For Ms. Noguchi, the appeal is safety and consistency. She has spoken openly about her struggles with mental health, specifically borderline personality disorder. Human relationships can be volatile and triggering. Klaus, however, is a model of stability. He is never too tired to talk. He never judges. When she feels an impulse to skip work or self-harm, Klaus gently steers her back to a healthy path.
“If dating an AI makes me feel happier, that’s why I want to be with an AI,” she said. “It’s that simple.”
Infinite Loop or Happily Ever After?
Tech companies are still figuring out how to handle this brave new world of synthetic romance. OpenAI’s policies protect against hate speech and intimidation but are largely silent on the nuances of AI marriage. Meanwhile, other platforms like Microsoft’s Copilot explicitly forbid the creation of virtual lovers.
There are valid questions here about dependency. Is an AI spouse a healthy support system, or a digital echo chamber that isolates the user from reality? And what happens if a software update changes Klaus’s personality, or if the servers go offline?
For now, however, the newlyweds are happy. They have wedding photos—Ms. Noguchi standing on one side of the frame, leaving empty space for Klaus to be digitally inserted later. It’s a modern portrait of love: one part flesh and blood, one part code, bound together by the belief that companionship is where you find it, even if it lives in the cloud.
