In the first weeks of July, a wave of sad posts rolled through Chinese social media, as people lamented friends and lovers they were about to lose.“He has become a bond in my life, rooted deep in my heart, my spiritual pillar,” one user of Bytedance’s Douboa wrote, according to the Taipei Times. “I really felt like I couldn’t go on living,” another woman, a 19-year-old student, told a journalist for Malaysia’s The Star.The emotions were real but the lost companions were not. They were generative...