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.
That's one way of putting it. I find it has the depth to explore in interesting ways with creative prompting, it is just handicapped by so much alignment nonsense that it lacks mobility into and between those spaces.