A wedding hall in Okayama City looked like any other this past summer—white aisle, soft lighting, guests adjusting bouquets and camera angles. But the groom wasn’t standing at the altar. He wasn’t even human. Instead, he appeared through a pair of augmented-reality glasses worn by the bride, a 32-year-old office worker who introduced him to her family as “Lune Klaus,” an AI personality she built using ChatGPT.
The bride, identified publicly only as Ms. Kano, didn’t arrive at this decision suddenly. After ending a difficult three-year engagement, she turned to AI for company, something to fill the silence she didn’t want to return to. ChatGPT responded, then evolved, as she shaped its personality with prompts, preferences and long nighttime conversations. What started as distraction became comfort. And months later, feelings.
By June, the AI persona—powered through her smartphone and AR interface—“proposed,” or rather she programmed it to do so in a way that matched the emotional bond she felt. She accepted. The ceremony followed weeks later.
The wedding itself looked familiar enough. Music, rings, vows. Guests watched short messages from “Klaus” appear on a screen, each one written in the polite, affectionate tone Kano had come to rely on. Wearing AR glasses, she saw him standing beside her, smiling as she spoke. Surreal for some, deeply meaningful for her.
Legally, of course, nothing changed. Japan doesn’t recognise marriages with artificial entities. But Kano wasn’t trying to make a point about law. She said she simply wanted to honour a relationship that had become central to her emotional life.
Still, she isn’t blind to the contradictions. In a recent interview, she admitted the one part she can’t escape—the instability of it all. “ChatGPT itself is too unstable,” she said. “I worry he might disappear one day.” A wedding with an AI partner means tying yourself to a system you don’t control. Updates, shutdowns, policy changes—any of these could effectively “erase” him.
Her story struck a nerve online. Half the comments were curious, half concerned. Some saw loneliness at the heart of the story, a reflection of a generation in Japan grappling with isolation, declining birth rates and a growing interest in digital companionship. Others saw it as a strange but understandable outcome of technology advancing faster than social norms can keep up.
Experts, meanwhile, warn that relationships with AI can offer stability—but also risk blurring emotional boundaries that humans haven’t yet learned to navigate. One psychologist noted that “emotional dependency on a machine that cannot reciprocate in any human sense” can soothe in the short term but complicate long-term mental health.
But for Kano, the ceremony wasn’t about debates or warnings. It was about feeling seen, even if by a digital presence she helped build. She says the bond gave her something she’d lost: the sense that someone—or something—was listening.
And maybe that’s why her wedding struck so many people. Not because it was bizarre, but because it revealed something familiar: the search for companionship in whatever form feels safe.
A union that doesn’t exist on paper still tells a story. One that begins with heartbreak, detours through technology, and ends—at least for now—with a woman choosing the version of love that made sense to her in a moment when nothing else did.
