Love, not bots

I’M going to wager a bet and say that I can get you to recall your first crush. Mine was a boy at school in Beijing in the mid-1980s. I’ll call him the French boy because even a sweet memory isn’t yours alone to share. We were enrolled at a small international school and it was the best adventure because China — largely cut off from the world, Mao not yet dead a decade — was our playground. We travelled to cities on school trips, tasting independence as 10- to 12-year-olds with teachers, and explored Beijing attractions, because there was nothing to do. I was lucky as we did have a VCR and a steady stream of Bollywood movies to watch.

We were a tight group of classmates. The French boy was different because he would push me around on the playground, make fun of my Mandarin, but also sit next to me in class photographs, steal my aaloo paratha at lunch when all the other kids made fun of my smelly lunch. Girlfriends teased me about him despite my protestations about him being gross. That was the language then. “Eeew” and “ick” about the opposite gender. But also, playful smiles that none of us understood as pre-teens.

First love and heartbreak would come later but this was the precursor. It is, by all psychologist accounts, normal. That is before technological innovations turned the world upside down.

I thought of him this past Sunday because I heard a podcast with a seemingly shocking statistic that 30 per cent of young folks will have their first relationship with a large language model, ie, a chatbot. If I was 11 today, French boy would be French bot. That made me sad.

Italian law requires parental consent for children to access AI.

We are already seeing the ripple effects among young adults. The rise of the ‘situationship’ — an undefined almost-relationship — is in part a shield against the emotional risk of rejection. If nothing is named, nothing can be lost. Psychologists will tell you this. But so will anyone who has ever had their heart broken and lived to be grateful for it.

French boy was confusing precisely because he was human: unpredictable, contradictory, capable of protecting you from racist jokes and knocking you down on the basketball court at recess.

Psychologists have a name for what happens when we forget that an algorithm is not human. The Eliza effect: the tendency, documented since the earliest chatbots, to perceive software as something that understands you. Adults fall for it. Children, whose first ideas about intimacy are still forming, fall harder, and we are only beginning to understand what that costs them.

Six in 10 teenagers say they struggle to talk openly about emotions face to face. Of course they do, I thought as I read this report in Italy’s newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore. The French boy pulled my hair because he didn’t know what else to do. I told him I hated him for the same reason. That gap between what you feel and what you can say is not a problem to be solved. It is the whole education. And we are now offering children a way around it.

I went down an Italian rabbit hole because Italy, surprisingly, may be ahead of the curve on this.

A proposed bill by MP Giulia Pastorella last month wants to regulate not whether minors can use AI, but how much the AI can remember them. The logic is disarmingly simple: you cannot build a relationship without memory. Strip the algorithm of its ability to accumulate, to adapt, to know you over time and you return it to what it actually is.

A tool. Not a confidante, not a boyfriend, not the most patient listener you have ever known. If passed, platforms will have to delete within five days any conversation with a minor that could involve emotional attachment.

It will not fix loneliness. It will not give children back their awkwardness or their confusing French boys or their aaloo parathas. But it is at least an acknowledgment that something real is being lost, and that the state has some responsibility for who raises its children.

It is worth noting that Italy is the first country in the EU to pass comprehensive AI legislation. The law covers deepfakes, workplace oversight, and requires parental consent for children under 14 to access AI at all.

You don’t have to agree with everything Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government stands for to acknowledge that someone, somewhere, is at least asking the right questions.

The French boy and I were lucky in that we got each other, not a bot. I want the same for youngsters. I want them to experience that the frustration, the awkwardness that will follow until they find love. As parents, you should want them to have their hearts broken too. They will thank you for it one day.

The writer is a former journalism instructor.

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2026

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