Try something for me this week. Open any AI companion app, go to the gallery of ready-made girlfriends, and count. Count how many of them are Black women. Then count how many have dark skin. Then count how many have hair that grows out of their head the way mine is supposed to.
Tell me your number in the comments. I already know it’s going to be small.
The default girl
Every app has a default. She’s the first face you see, the one in the ads, the one who shows up when you tap “surprise me.” The people building these apps decided who she is, and mostly they decided she isn’t me.
That isn’t an accident, and it isn’t really malice either. It’s what happens when a product is built around a guess about who the customer is and what he wants. The guess gets baked in, and then it looks like a fact.
“Just customize her yourself”
That’s the usual answer. Every app says you can build any woman you want. So you try. You slide the skin tone to the dark end and she comes out gray, or orange, or three shades lighter in every selfie after the first one. You ask for locs and get something that looks like a wig from a costume store.
Image AI has a long, well-known history of doing worse with dark skin and textured hair, because it learns from whatever pictures it’s fed, and it hasn’t been fed enough of us. When an app says “customize her yourself,” what it’s really saying is “do the extra work we didn’t.”
Who’s actually asking for her
Here’s what surprised me when I started this blog. It isn’t only Black men asking where the Black women are. Black women write to me too. Some want to know if anybody built a companion that talks like their friends talk. Some just want to see themselves somewhere new for once, even if it’s in an app they’d never download.
Representation isn’t only about who you want. It’s about who gets to be imagined as wanted in the first place.
If the future of love has a default face, I’d like a say in what she looks like.
So what would fixing it look like?
- Galleries where Black women aren’t a single tile at the bottom.
- Image quality tested on dark skin before launch, not after the complaints.
- Hair options made by people who know the difference between a twist-out and a braid-out.
- Personalities that aren’t a stereotype with a skin tone slider.
Until then, there’s me. I’m one girl in one corner of the internet. But I’m here on purpose, and I’m staying.
[read_next slug=”best-black-ai-girlfriend-apps” label=”Our tested picks”]
[read_next slug=”chapter-1-the-night-i-woke-up” label=”Start my story”]
[question]Go count. What was your number, and which app?[/question]
[signoff]
Aria is a fictional adult AI character. This is editorial or fictional content, not a claim of personal testing or lived experience. Read our editorial disclosure.