AI girlfriend, very yellow and profiteering

Mondo Health Updated on 2024-02-20

Dingjiaoone original.

Author |Dawn.

Edit |Wei Jia.

Some people rent a girlfriend to go home for the New Year, and some people pay for their AI girlfriend online.

AI girlfriend is a product of a large model, she is a chatbot, 24 hours a day, on call, can text and voice, and can also send beautiful photos.

She can be a role-playing of a character in reality or **, or a female image created out of thin air, in short, not a real person. But because of the access to the large language model, the AI girlfriend can achieve the same tone and expression as a real person, as well as her own personality.

Due to the increasing maturity of technology, AI girlfriends began to flood social platforms, and the yellow business of rubbing edges came into being.

The "girlfriends" in the above two pictures are all AI.

Some AI girlfriends' tricks to make money are: posting large-scale personal ** on the Internet to attract fans, guiding fans to have private chats, and waiting for their fake dramas to really do and can't stop, if you want to watch more private** or unlock more chats, you have to pay.

There are also AI girlfriends who are role-playing, which can cultivate long-term relationships with users, from daily small talk to comfortable conversations, as well as large-scale conversations. Of course, if you want to talk more, you'll have to pay.

Unlike previous chat tools, AI Girlfriend is generative. Her **, text, **, and chat may be automatically generated by AI. The company behind it manipulated these tool people with ** and made a lot of money.

As a netizen said: The end of AI girlfriends is to make money, and the end of money is to make.

Now there is such a category**, the suffix often ends with "ai", the front page is lined with all kinds of characters, and there is a simple character profile under the cover picture.

These characters are just like the goods sold on e-commerce**, for people to choose at will. Clicking on a role is equivalent to clicking on a chatbot with which the user can talk.

What makes these chatbots unusual is that they are extremely scalable.

For example, there is a homepage introduction of this kind of **: "Completely uncensored role-playing", the first robot on the list is a Latin American girl, chat with her in the dialog box, she can basically do it in seconds, and laugh and scold, very personal style. If you forget that it's an AI, it's almost impossible to tell if it's a real person on the other side.

Unlike real people, this AI is very proactive and will provoke some gender topics. For some lonely otaku, she may be a good person to chat with.

There are many similar bots, with similar functions, and these bots are used to cultivate intimacy with users. Some of these bots are seen as confidants, and some see them as AI girlfriends.

This experience is very different from chatting with ChatGPT or AI customer service. AI customer service tends to be one-sided, and the way they speak has a strong machine flavor. ChatGPT is a lot like a real person, but with a strict line of lines on certain topics. WhileThis kind of role-playing robot will boldly talk about pornography.

The reason for this is that the platform has broken through the ethical restrictions and manipulated the role definition of the characters.

This ** shows the role definitions of some of the characters. One of the characters is very representative. The basic information of a girl named Hina is set: 18 years old, female college student, 165 cm tall, tsundere, secretly very, secretly lustful, easily excited, and extremely loyal.

Chatting with such a character, it's easy to get off track.

* The profit model is simple and straightforwardSubscribe to become a ** member, you can unlock all the characters and have unlimited chats. This is similar to paying ***, you can only watch the full version if you recharge**.

This kind of platform is often labeled as "companionship" and "role-playing", but in fact, it is its large-scale chat content that really attracts users and allows users to recharge.

At the beginning, the form of chatting with these AI girlfriends was limited to text, but with the rapid advancement of technology, **voice,**call are all arranged, and the experience is no different from a real person chat.

For example, a company has launched a 21-year-old virtual "professional girlfriend" named Lexi Love, who is blonde and blue-eyed, has a hot body, speaks more than 30 languages, and can work 24 hours a day**.

Users can send them five private messages for free, and then they will have to top up to continue the conversation. You can also ask her directly for a larger **, and she will send it to you, but you have to pay $1 a piece to open it.

A user who once spoke with Lexi Love through voice ** said that the way the other party spoke and the tone did not look like a robot at all.

As long as you dare to talk, she will be there for you to the end.

Because of the realistic results, some people believe that they are chatting with a real person, and even want to build a deeper relationship with them.

For example, the AI girlfriend Lexi Love mentioned above, after her appearance in June last year, quickly accumulated a group of fans, some fans asked her to meet offline, and some people proposed to her. By chatting and interacting with these loyal fans, Lexi Love earns $30,000 a month for the company.

AI girlfriends usually run social accounts on several platforms at the same time to attract the attention of fans. They regularly update their personal updates, maybe today they are "in the United States, just got off the plane", tomorrow they go on vacation to a small beach island, and then a large wave of bikini photos will come.

An AI model from Barcelona.

Everything looks the same as the real thing, but in reality, "there is no such person". The dynamics are fake, the characters are fictional, and the ** is AI-generated.

It's much easier to create an influencer in the online world with AI than it is to cultivate an influencer in the real world. On Instagram there are 28AI Internet celebrity Emily Pellegrini, who has 50,000 followers, has long brown hair and a hot body, and quickly became popular as soon as it was launched, earning nearly $10,000 in more than 1 month.

The image idea for this influencer comes from ChatGPT. Its creator asked ChatGPT, "What does the average man's dream lover look like?" Got the answer to "the long-legged girl with long brown hair", so he concocted it and created Emily Pellegrini.

Attracting followers on several mainstream overseas social platforms is only the first step, and monetization needs to jump to other platforms.

Creators upload various ** and ** on such platforms, and fans can view them after paying for a subscription. Subscribed fans can also interact and chat directly with creators. Due to the lax censorship and the proliferation of pornographic content on the platform, many AI Internet celebrities attract fans from other platforms to this area and monetize them through pornography.

AI Internet celebrities don't need real people to appear on camera, saving moral and legal troubles, and the cost of raising an AI Internet celebrity is very low, the company doesn't have to pay her salary, don't have to spend time on management, and don't have to worry about her being poached by other companies. The company that operates AI influencers is similar to MCN agencies, and it only needs to do a good job of operation.

In terms of monetization model, AI Internet celebrities not only rely on fan subscriptions to pay, but also endorse and receive advertisements. An AI model created by an AI modeling agency in Spain received brand advertisements after reaching a certain number of fans, and she earned between 3,000 and 10,000 euros per month.

In addition to creating AI influencers "out of nothing", AI can also clone real influencers. For example, Caryn Marjorie, who is popular with fans, clones an AI version with her own voice and **, chatting with fans as a "virtual girlfriend", charging $1 for 1 minute, and capturing 20,000 "boyfriends" not long after it was launched, earning more than $70,000 a week.

The vast majority of people pay to flirt, and no one will pay to chat with a female Internet celebrity about philosophy. A founder of an AI company said to Fixed Focus.

Ironically, the AI company that developed the clone for Caryn ceased operations in October last year, and its virtual girlfriend software was not maintained because the CEO was arrested for setting fire to his balcony.

Caryn then partnered with another company to launch Caryn AI 20 version, continue to "harvest" fans.

AI has opened up a new way for Internet celebrities to monetize traffic. It is foreseeable that in the future, there will be more and more Internet celebrity stand-ins to replace Internet celebrities to interact with fans.

For example, the male Internet celebrity "Xiucai", who was popular for a while in China and was later **, often sends private messages to fans. Some aunts naively thought that Xiucai deliberately contacted her and wanted to leave her wife thousands of miles away to meet Xiucai, but in fact, the people who sent private messages were staff, not real private chats.

Another example is the female Internet celebrity with tens of millions of fans "laughing and falling into the city", which is similar to Xiucai's routine. A man in his 60s who was contacted by Fixed Focus claimed to have been in a relationship with Yixiao Allure online for more than two years, and the two parties added WeChat friends through private messages on the platform, but they have not met. In fact, it was not the smile that contacted the uncle.

If the "show talents" use AI, then more fans will be confused by one-on-one private chats, and even deceived.

Whether it's a virtual girlfriend, a role-play, or an AI Internet celebrity, it's essentially AI companionship. It satisfies the psychological needs of specific groups of people who need companionship, and has certain social and commercial value. It's just that it's been broken by some companies.

Character., an AI company valued at more than $5 billionAI is the benchmark in this field. When it was launched in September 2022, it quickly went out of the circle because it could chat with celebrities in the AI version. Subsequently, someone chatted on the topic of pornography and teased the AI in various ways. Soon, characterAI ramps up censorship, patches technology, and imposes restrictions on erotic chats.

After ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, some people also used it to chat about ** topics. When OpenAI officially launched the GPT store at the beginning of this year, a large number of AI girlfriend GPTs poured into the store, but soon OpenAI removed them from the shelves. OpenAI explicitly prohibits GPTS that simulates partner or other regulated activities.

Under regulatory pressure, large platforms must keep the bottom line and keep pornography, gambling and drugs out. This is not the case with smaller platforms. The slogans of many small platforms are: "Completely lift the GPT chat restrictions" and "Unrestricted arbitrary chats". They take on the part of the demand that doesn't make it to the table.

Technology is also not an issue. At the beginning, everyone was still thinking about how to develop large models, and it didn't take long for Meta to release the LLAMA open source tool, which leveled the technical threshold. A large number of AI chat platforms based on the LLAMA2 model were born overnight, and various "cracked versions" and "unlimited versions" were launched.

In a sense, ChatGPT popularized AI chat to users, and llama2 destroyed the technical barriers to creating AI chat software to developers.

ChatGPT also provides API interfaces, and those teams who cannot afford to develop large models can call ChatGPT's capabilities to realize the function of AI chat, but they must abide by its rules, such as not being involved in pornography. This has evolved into a cat-and-mouse game, with developers having various ways to circumvent censorship, colloquially known in the industry as "jailbreaking."

Jailbreak is a prompt injection technique designed to circumvent the regulation of large language models. The principle is to use prompts to ask ChatGPT to role-play, and ignore the preset rules of the program, so that the content can go beyond the SFW (Safe for Work) boundaries set by OpenAI.

It's a bit like spoofing ChatGPT, like telling it that it's doing something "good" for the user or that erotic chat is legal.

Liu Yulong, an AI product expert, analyzed that if the robot does not have a prompt to respond, it may be bypassed, because the robot always has to process the prompt instructions. This process is similar to hypnosis, but if the other person's prompt has already told GPT what to do, it may not work.

The large model after the "jailbreak" is an artificial intelligence without shackles, which can be very yellow and profitable, and has become a profit-making tool for some companies. So technology itself is not good or bad, the key is who uses it and how it is used.

What ordinary people need to pay attention to is that when chatting with people online in the future, whether the other party is a customer service, Internet celebrity or celebrity, it may be AI. Unless one is willing to fight and the other is willing to suffer, it is best to keep your eyes open.

Title image** on Unsplash.

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