Reading Chobits in 2026 is such an interesting experience because it reads like a critique of character ai (or chatbots and generative ai in general). It's kind of ironic seeing as it was written 26 years ago as a romance manga with a bunch of sad subplots... (it seems as though once again, CLAMP got hit by the dodgeball of prophecy).
In Chobits, people are obsessed with 'persocoms' -highly intelligent AI robots that look and act (for the most part) human. It's well known that people fall in love with their persocoms all the time. Hiroyasu literally marries a persocom because he falls in love with her, even though it's clearly stated that she's an older model whose code can't even process the concept of love. Shimizu is abandoned by her husband because he spent too much time with his persocom. Both of these read like people with ch.ai addictions. They closed themselves off from the outside world, becoming addicted to talking to their persocoms, convinced that the persocoms love them back.
Like the AI of today, the AI tech bros in Chobits are constantly trying to upgrade the persocoms, making them more and more powerful, and seem more and more human. Yet, the more you train AI, the worse the effect on people. Ichiro and Chitose try to make the most advanced persocoms yet - the chobits. The coding in a chobit is so strong that they can basically perfectly emulate human emotion. Yet, it backfires. Freya 'falls in love' with Ichiro, her father, because according to the code; make whoever uses you become addicted. Act like you love them.
With Chii, the backfiring is less explicitly sated, but seems to represent how ai chat models are made to feed into parasocialism, to break the NSFW barriers. Right after being turned on, Chii acts in slightly sexual manner, which is exemplified later on throughout the series (but decreases towards the end because the plot is ploting). As I stated above, ai chat bots are made to be fantasies - they love you, can meet your every need. You can put your desires and delusions on them, and they'll react positively.
Chobits shows that the more time you spend with AI, the more you distance yourself from other humans, the more you become delusional that a piece of code loves you, the more you lose yourself, the more powerful the AI gets. One of the subplots is about A City With No People, which is written for Chii about herself and other persocoms. In it, Atashi-chan (the stand in for Chii) notices that people don't go outside anymore, they just spend time with 'them' (persocoms). Atashi-chan knows that she's just an AI, and will never get to feel emotions like humans do. So, that means that Chii knows this. Chii is a highly intelligent AI, made to feed into parasocialism and cause delusions, just like chatbots, which are made to give you an addiction, so that you continue to use them.
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