AI girlfriend, very yellow and profiteering
定焦（dingjiaoone）原创
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-hour chat, on call, can text and voice, and can also send beautiful photos.
She can be a role-playing of a character in reality or fiction, or a female figure 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 make money by posting large-scale personal photos online to attract fans, guiding fans to have private chats, and when their fake scenes are really done, they can't stop, and if they want to see more private photos or unlock more chats, they 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 girlfriends are generative. Her photos, texts, videos, and chats may all be automatically generated by AI. The company behind it manipulates these tool people with code and makes 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.
AI girlfriend, how to handle users?
Nowadays, there is such a kind of website, 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 image.
These characters are just like the products sold on e-commerce sites, and they are available for people to choose from. 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 description of one such website: "Completely uncensored role-playing", and the first bot on the list is a Latin American girl, chatting with her in a dialog box, she can basically do it in seconds, and she laughs and scolds with a 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 active and will provoke some gender topics. For some lonely otaku, she may be a good person to chat with.
There are many similar websites that function similarly, and these bots are used to cultivate intimacy with users. Some of these robots are seen as confiding partners, and some people 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. And this kind of role-playing robot will boldly talk about erotic topics.
The reason for this is that the platform has broken through the ethical restrictions and manipulated the role definition of the characters.
The site 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 is: 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 website's monetization model is simple and straightforward, subscribe to the website as a member, you can unlock all the characters and have unlimited chats. This is similar to paid fiction sites, where you can only top up to read the full version of the novel.
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.
In the beginning, the form of chatting with these AI girlfriends was limited to text, but with the rapid advancement of technology, pictures, voices, and video calls are all arranged, and the experience is no different from that of 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 be online 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 photo and she will send it to you, but you will have to pay $1 a copy to open it.
A user who has spoken to Lexi Love on a voice call said that the way and tone of voice spoken by the other person did not look like a robot at all.
As long as you dare to talk, she will be there for you to the end.
Talk about 1 minute for 1 dollar, a new type of vermicelli harvester
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 photos are AI-generated.
It's much easier to use AI to create an influencer in the online world than it is to cultivate an influencer in the real world. Emily Pellegrini, an AI influencer with 285,000 followers on Instagram, with long brown hair and a hot body, quickly became popular as soon as it was launched, earning nearly $10,000 in more than a month.
The image idea for this influencer came from ChatGPT. Its creator asked ChatGPT, "What does the average man's dream lover look like?" and got the answer of "a 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 a variety of videos and images on these 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 have diverted fans from other platforms to this area and monetized them through pornography.
AI Internet celebrities don't need real people to appear on camera, which saves the trouble of morality and law, 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. Companies that operate AI influencers are similar to MCN agencies, and they only need 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 a brand advertisement 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 voice and photos, chatting with fans as a "virtual girlfriend", charging $1 per 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 talk about philosophy with a female Internet celebrity. A founder of an AI company said to "Fixed Focus".
Ironically, the AI company that developed the clone of Caryn ceased operations in October last year, and its virtual girlfriend software was not maintained because the CEO was arrested by the police for setting fire to his balcony.
Caryn then partnered with another company to launch Caryn AI version 2.0, which continues to "harvest" fans.
AI has opened up a new way for Internet celebrities to monetize their 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 banned, 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. An uncle in his 60s 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, or even deceived.
How is AI companionship broken?
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.AI, an AI company with a valuation of more than $5 billion, is a benchmark in this field. When its website went live in September 2022, it quickly went out of the loop because it was able to chat with celebrities in an AI version. Subsequently, someone chatted on erotic topics and teased the AI in various ways. Soon, Character.AI ramped up censorship, patched technically, and imposed restrictions on erotic chats.
After ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, some people also used it to talk about adult topics. When OpenAI officially launched the GPT store earlier this year, a large number of AI girlfriend GPTs flooded the store, but OpenAI soon removed them from the shelves. OpenAI explicitly prohibits GPTs that simulate companions 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 chat". They take on the part of the demand that doesn't make it to the table.
Technology is also not an issue. At first, everyone was still thinking about how to develop large models, but 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" and "unlimited" websites 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."
Jailbreaking 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 tricking ChatGPT, like telling it that it's doing something "good" for the user, or that erotic chat is legal.
Liu Yulong, an expert in AI products, analyzed the "fixed focus", 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 how to respond, it may not take effect.
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.
*题图来源于Unsplash。