It’ll be a billion dollar business just like Clash of Clans or Candy Crush are. A few whales will account for the vast majority of the spend and the majority of the population won’t even touch it.
It’s still $1B worth of TAM the question would be how spread out that revenue stream would be.
Quite a few Onlyfans “creators” are launching their own “companion bots” and even sexdolls right now.
I suspect the most profitable venture would likely be a middleware for those creators as you would likely need to ground it in reality somewhat to hook in people.
I’m actually surprised that Onlyfans isn’t on top of it as they are directly positioned to launch an adult GenAI service with royalties as they have access to the most relevant training data in terms of photos, videos and most importantly a the chat messages between “creators” and “clients”.
Even aside from this skeezy and exploitative business model, there are people who already have sort of para-social relationships with vanilla chatgpt..
that's just one especially sad example I found, but I've seen others..
It is very difficult to _not_ think of these chatbots as people when you interact with them, and if you're a person who is starving for human attention, you're going to start thinking of it as your friend.
Twitch thrives on parasocial. If you can imagine a twitch egirl being replaced by an AI twitch egirl that responds to personal customized messages.. I can easily see that as a big industry. Sad but inevitable
> Sophie Dee’s artificial-intelligence doppelganger talks like a sparkling conversationalist: bubbly, curious, eager to please. It never sleeps or takes vacation, and it even creates fake selfies that make Dee look younger, bustier and blemish-free.
> But Dee, an adult-content creator in Las Vegas, doesn’t see SophieAI as a threat. The image-generating chatbot, trained to mimic her look and speech, makes her money with every fan who uses it, starting at $4.99 a month. And after 20 years in the pornography business, Dee, 39, said she is happy to outsource some of her identity for a less demanding revenue stream.
The reality is that you can have better conversations with them than with most actual human beings via social media, comment sections, forum-equivalents, etc, so why not?
The LLM critic in me can't help but notice that ChatGPT-3.5 completely whiffed its explanation of integration in the original post, but of course did so in a fluent, confident way that made its response sound like it was correct.
The ease with which LLMs launder misinformation at scale is genuinely dismaying.
"when you integrate a function you find the accumulation of its rate of change" is simply wrong. You find the accumulation of the function itself, not its deltas.
GPT is confusing the fundamental theorem of calculus with the meaning of integration.
ETA: what makes LLMs so worrying is that I know calculus quite well, and I think GPT-4 is dumber than a mouse, yet I still felt gaslit by GPT-3.5's wrong answer! I had to make a mental picture to make sure I wasn't contradicting the Mighty Talking Robot. This technology is poison.
We have always had a cognitive bias towards believing glib explanations. We just hold AIs to a higher standard than we do actual human beings. The bias is particularly biased towards attractive individuals we want agree with (so they like us more).
That's incorrect, it's a MUCH bigger business. It was clear to me a decade ago that this is where it was headed, transformers just made clear a realistic near term timeline.
I don't doubt this is true. OnlyFans exists basically as a way of having a pretend [girl|boy]friend.
You can find porn of basically any demographic you want on the internet in about ten second with any popular search engine. If your goal is just to see porn, you can do that for free (or with a cheaper all-encompassing subscription to some kind of MindGeek service). I think people pay for OnlyFans for the more parasocial aspects of it.
As chatbots get better and better at mimicking human dialog, I think it'll become pretty easy to fake the parasocial aspects of this stuff. At that point, having the pretend girlfriend becomes a decidedly cheaper process, and maybe arguably more ethical? At least with the AI chatbot, there's not a person being sexually objectified because they need to pay rent next month.
> At least with the AI chatbot, there's not a person being sexually objectified because they need to pay rent next month.
Not sure that's a good thing. For some people, AI powered buddies will be a perfect training ground for all kinds of abusive behaviour. Because "it's a machine, no one gets hurt, right?".
Over time this will only help to blur the lines concerning acceptable behaviour towards others (with others = any group that includes humans).
I mean, that's one possibility, but does evidence actually indicate that's true? I play Grand Theft Auto like an utter psychopath and I don't go around running people over in my free time.
I'll acknowledge it's not an apples to apples comparison, because it's much harder to view the characters in GTA like real people, they are still pretty obviously cartoon characters, but these are the arguments people made when violent video games started getting popular in the 90's, despite the fact that the violent crime rate has gone down pretty consistently since the 90's.
>at least with the AI chatbot, there's not a person being sexually objectified because they need to pay rent next month.
I would love to be sexually objectified for a living if I had the looks and the bravery to put myself out there. AI is, once again, representing a threat to some of fulfilling and competitive careers.
I am sure some love it, and to be clear I am not suggesting we make it illegal or anything, but I suspect a lot of the people on Onlyfans don’t really love getting messages from horny dudes every day.
I wouldn’t know, I am not an Onlyfans model, it’s just a hunch I have.
I didn't think about it initially (was making something for my kids related to letters from santa), but I ended up getting a lot of folks from prisons to sign up for this very reason.
It already is if you add it to the same market/category as platforms like OnlyFans and much of Twitch. AI or not, it comes down to the same concept with users paying for equally fake and meaningless parasocial interaction and associated pornography.
Most people will have AI assistants, friends, and emotional tampons. It will probably run on your smartphone after a fine-tune in the cloud. But I don't think it's going to be a profitable business due to already heavy competition.
OTOH, maybe people will chase base models considering what's popular and that would have a good price margin. And just like music and Hollywood, there will be a manipulated market to impose trends to squeeze subscriber dollars. Where even popular indie base models are actually secretly owned by Disney/Universal subsidiaries.
Maybe niche for girlfriends/boyfriends but I would imagine there will be a big market for personal assistants. Imagine an assistant that knows your preferences, your schedule, your family details, your task list and has the ability to act on your behalf. Online order my food for the week knowing I have people coming on Friday, maybe ask a few questions for clarification, order a present for my wife knowing what I have previously bought her and what she did and didn't like, notice that my favorite band is coming to my city and ask do I want tickets, find the cheapest insurance when my renewal is up and pay it, notice that my gas bill is unusally high look for cheaper providers. The list is endless and whoever is first in that space with a reliable product will be a trillion dollar company.
To me personally that sounds like the setting for a horror flick. Actually it almost reminds me of M3GAN. [1] Fun movie, but I do not want to experience that. That is even before treading into the possibilities of remote hacking, monitoring, manipulation, stalking, etc...
A good chunk of that trillion dollars would be spent fighting lawsuits.
These issues are not the usual working out of bugs in technology. We're hitting a point where decisions are undecidable. It's not the tech, but the opinions about it and usage of it.
I agree. Not shaming anyone because there could be multiple reasons for this niche, not necessary loneliness.
If it's the latter those people need to socialize a little more for the sake of everyone, but especially the people they find. We can't go on like this.
Sure we can. The first androids will of course be for sexual purposes, and loading your custom AI into it, with personalized training and datastore will be all the rage.
Your AI girlfriend will be embodied!
Think of a realdoll that moves, speaks, and does... um, other things.
I wonder sometimes if people are assuming their potential partner doesn't want that action also?
Nothing could be more natural than getting it on with someone. It's not selfish to want human contact. Perspectives and incentives are all out of whack these days.
I'm not sure I agree. a lot of twitch, YouTube, onlyfans, and more is built on parasocial relationships. Those people are people though. They can't be online all the time, they'll grow and change over time, and they might not be exactly perfect.
AI girlfriends by contrast don't have those issues and can "work" for far less.
Besides if we're willing to move the goalposts a bit and look beyond romance, there are a lot of lonely people who are already in the market for someone to talk to.
Guy who runs a company that no-one has ever heard of in saying something shocker. I'm not sure how this is news, even by the rather weak standards of the nypost.
