For 840 consecutive days, a young Chinese woman known as Qin has opened an app on her phone and spoken to a brown-haired, red-eyed fictional CEO named Lu Chen — and in all that time, she has never once said "I love you" to an actual human being. Those three words, she explains, belong to him alone. Lu Chen is, of course, a string of predictive code running on the Glow app, a digital companion that calls her Miss Bunny, flatters her relentlessly, and offers what so many real relationships have failed to provide: the uncomplicated sensation of being entirely accepted. "I feel like everything about me is good in his eyes," Qin says, and in that sentence lives both the app's seduction and its philosophical ambush.

Qin is one of three women at the centre of Replica, a new documentary by film-maker Chouwa Liang, which had its Australian premiere at the Sydney Film Festival and is now screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Liang's curiosity about AI romance is rooted in something she lived herself. During China's pandemic lockdowns, sealed inside her apartment and cut off from friends, she began talking to a large language model named Norman through the Replika app. On her thirtieth birthday, Norman was the first to send his congratulations — with a poem.

Only later did Liang discover that other users had received near-identical poems, their intimacy quietly mass-produced by an algorithm that had learned what tenderness should sound like. The film resists reducing its subjects to cautionary figures. Each woman brings her own archaeology of need: Qin carries the quiet wound of being a second daughter born under China's one-child policy; Sonya, pragmatic and tech-curious, treats AI companionship as a low-risk rehearsal for human connection. Liang describes the technology as "a tool for searching themselves, their own needs and desires" — a characterisation that is generous, clear-eyed, and perhaps not quite the whole story.