[Markoff]

"New research has revealed that one in five boys aged 12-16 is either in or knows of a boy their age who is in a romantic relationship with an AI companion."

"Almost one in 10 (9% of) boys aged 12-16 years old have used AI to create sexual images of their friends, with 5% admitting to using AI to create sexual images of family members, according to Male Allies research."

edit: can't find the original report the articles are based on, here is older report, but it doesn't cover romantic relationships with AI companion

https://www.maleallies.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Male...

so I guess they didn't release publically the new one

[gus_massa]

> "New research has revealed that one in five boys aged 12-16 is either in or knows of a boy their age who is in a romantic relationship with an AI companion."

Let's say a class has 25 students, and magically everyone know that other students uses a romantic AI companion. So 1/5 of the class has one of them, so it's like 1/125 persons = 0.8%. It's hard to get a good statistic from this numbers, it's not clear that everyone in a class know what the other do and that the wall between classes is so high that nobody else know. In conclusion, "knows of a boy their age" is a crappy criteria.