AI companion and AI girlfriend apps are a useful stress test for a problem that affects many stateful AI products: the claims users care about are easy to market and surprisingly hard to verify.
"Long-term memory" can mean remembering a name ten messages later, retaining a fact across sessions, or keeping dozens of facts straight after the conversation has accumulated noise. "Consistent characters" can mean tone, biography, appearance, or all three. A single successful image says almost nothing about the next ten generations.
Yet many review pages turn those claims into precise-looking scores without showing the paid plan, test date, prompt sequence, transcript, retries, or failed generations behind the number.
I wanted a test another person could actually rerun.
The manual baseline
