From in vitro fertilization to designer babies, the world of reproductive science has seen advances over the years that have profoundly changed the way humans conceive and give birth.
Unfortunately, artificial human wombs are not yet among those breakthroughs that have made the jump from concept to real life. But that hasn't stopped a number of news sites from running with a bonkers story about plans to build a humanoid "pregnancy robot" that carries real human fetuses to term in a synthetic womb installed into its hardware.
In recent weeks, outlets including Newsweek, The Telegraph and the New York Post have published stories about these purportedly forthcoming pregnancy bots. Said to be the brainchild of a Chinese business owner named Zhang Qifeng, the alleged founder of a company called Kaiwa Technology, these gestational robots could supposedly be in prototype by next year — that is, if the story was true, and the man behind this shocking invention verifiably existed.
As Snopes reports, this fancy bit of flagrant misinformation seems to have started circulating in earnest around August 11, when the Korean news outlet Chosun cited reports from a purported Chinese tech news site called Kuai Ke Zhi about Zhang and his ostensible plans for robotic pregnancy.
If it exists, Kuai Ke Zhi doesn't seem to have any digital footprint. Just as sketchily, Chosun also included a screenshot of a man who is supposed to be Zhang, which the Korean site claimed had come from Douyin, China's equivalent of TikTok.
Shown below, the image shows a man in glasses sitting in what appears to be a newsroom, looking at and talking to another man who we can only see partially and from behind.
Curiously, when we ran the image through Google Translate, it listed the Mandarin words superimposed on the image as saying Zhang Qifeng is the "founder of Shenzen Kaiva Robotics" — a slight mistranslation, it seems, of the real-life Chinese electronics manufacturer known as Shenzen Kaifa Technologies.
Zhang, notably, is not the founder of the multinational manufacturer, and we were not able to find any trace of him associated with it.
In that supposed video — which we couldn't find any sign of, beyond that one purported screenshot — the tech CEO was said to announce his pregnancy robot plans, and Chosun even included quotes from the supposed announcement.
"I initiated development to solve the population decline issue," Zhang allegedly said during the purported interview. "While commercial surrogacy is designated as illegal, I want to meet the demand of those who do not wish to marry but want to have children."
As misinformation is wont to do, the story traveled rapidly once it escaped containment. On August 15, both the notorious Daily Mail tabloid and the spammy science blog Interesting Engineering picked it up. Soon after, the story of the Chinese CEO's miracle robot also cropped up on the nursing site Nurse.org and the newsy mom blog Motherly, neither of which questioned its veracity as they broadcasted the phony story to their niche audiences.
As Snopes noted, Zhang was listed in some of the outlets as being affiliated with Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) as either a PhD graduate or professor. When the site's dedicated debunkers contacted NTU, however, a spokesperson said "no one by the name of 'Zhang Qifeng' graduated from NTU with a PhD," and there was no research on "gestational robots" being conducted there.
With so much evidence suggesting that Zhang and his company do not exist — never mind the fact that artificial wombs don't exist yet, full stop, either in stationary or grafted-to-a-robot form — it seems pretty clear that this story is fabricated from top to bottom.
But that clearly hasn't stopped half a dozen news sites from running with the story, to everybody's detriment.
More on misinformation: Wired and Business Insider Accidentally Published AI-Generated Slop Articles by Seemingly Fake Journalist
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