This obviously isn't something new that shows up overnight. We already had dating sims and the likes. But with generative AIs, the catch is that of scale and of personalization: not only it is easier to make thousands of virtual partners at a time, each individual virtual partners can be personalized to our liking.
Not even Huxley could have predicted this lol.
This is a symptom of a much bigger issue.
In japan the working culture is far worse than the US and working people have no time to date.
Being overworked is a generation-wide trauma, and this is just another company trying to capitalize off of that "market". This is the AI hype version of "online social clubs".