Show HN: Annie – An Uncensored AI Girlfriend

[Gigadroid]

A few day ago I launched an AI girlfriend service. It's completely uncensored, so compared to other AI girlfriend services you are not restricted to dive NSFW topics. She can even send you voice messages and pictures of her! You can also send voice messages and pictures your self and she will understand you just fine. To get started, you just need a Telegram account.

It's my first side project which I launched publicly, so I would really appreciate your feedback!

[nonameiguess]

Is there any meaningful evidence out there this does anything for anyone? You may or may not get enthustiast responses here, but how representative are these people how do we know it's not astroturfing, and how do we know they'll really get any long-term increase in life satisfaction out of a service like this?

I will freely admit I'm way outside of the target market and maybe I'm badly out-of-touch with what modern men need to feel fulfilled. I'm past a decade of marriage at this point and haven't been consistently girlfriendless since I was starting out high school 30 years ago. But when I think back over the decades about what makes having a human partner gratifying and worthwhile, it certainly isn't exchanging text messages or even photographs. Even aside from physical contact and consistently having sex when possible, you've got starting a family, sharing responsibilities for taking care of a mutually owned household, a person to experience things with over an entire lifetime who you consistently feel you can count on and rely upon if it comes to it. My wife went through serious alcoholism problems for a while, losing a job and becoming hospitalized twice. I went though severe spinal degeneration in my 30s and couldn't even consistently dress myself for a few years. I don't know if either of us would have gotten through it without the other. There is simply no replacement when going through hardship like this for having another human who loves you that you know you can rely upon no matter how hard circumstances get.

What you get out of long-term human social bonding is just not something you can replace with an LLM, no matter how good they get.

[mywittyname]

This stuff is too new to have been thoroughly researched.

> What you get out of long-term human social bonding is just not something you can replace with an LLM, no matter how good they get.

Most of my interactions with friends and family are via text messaging. I have close friends that I haven't seen in person for ages because they moved across the country/world and getting to visit all of them is expensive. I realize that not everyone socializes like I do, but for the contingent of people who do, I wouldn't be surprised if this is sufficient, especially as a replacement for those ancillary friends that you just chat about hobbies with.

[hulitu]

> This stuff is too new to have been thoroughly researched.

Maybe i am too old. Does the name Alice says anything to you ?

[127361]

It would be much nicer if this ran locally. That way you can say anything you want to it, without ever the possibility of someone policing it.

[cyanydeez]

I mean, assuming you know everything your hardware is doing.

but yeah, the need for privacy is oddly intertwined with AI features.

[127361]

Yes, I assume the hardware is not compromised, which is much easier to detect.

[squigz]

Is it though? How would you personally detect compromised hardware?

[127361]

Minimizing all software phoning home as much as possible, and then watching for suspicious network activity.

Also dumping the flash* contents out with JTAG. And even better than that, physically disabling the network interfaces completely and not ever connecting the device to the Internet at all.

* = also the eMMC controller internal firmware, this is where a sophisticated implant will likely reside

It's also very unlikely that the hardware would be compromised, the government doesn't want to waste a potentially high value exploit on ordinary people. If they do, they risk having their exploit captured and exposed, and thus wasting it.

[cyanydeez]

heck, how would you detect compromised models?

[egberts1]

Warning: requires a Telegram app, no web-based functionality

[ingonealan3]

I think that you are being misleading when you keep hammering the privacy aspect. Yes, end-to-end encryption means that only the people participating in the conversation can decrypt the messages. But as Annie, the service built by you, is part of the conversation, you as the creator also have, by extension, access to everything people send to the bot. I would otherwise laud your project, if it wasn't for this aspect, which to my eyes seems intentionally misleading.

[Gigadroid]

Yeah, completely valid criticism. It's encrypted before actually saving it to the DB but it's not encrypted end-to-end. I'll remove it from the website.

[fragmede]

https://callannie.ai/ may have some trademark issues with your choice of name...

[Gigadroid]

Oh, I didn't see this, thank you for making me aware of this...

[nyolfen]

i think AI boyfriends have a brighter future, consider who prefers to consume text-based content

[listless]

I had the same thought. Unfortunately, I think males are the ones in an epidemic of loneliness. Girls have easy options for immediate companionship - just jump on any dating app and swipe right once. That said, it’s the same guys hooking up with pretty much all the girls so certainly they are also desiring deeper, real connection.

Anyway. Good idea, but no way I’m messaging this thing on Telegram.

[mustacheemperor]

>just jump on any dating app and swipe right once

This ignores the very significant potential risks to personal safety which are simply much higher for women meeting new potential partners than for men. In addition to the stated distinction between companionship and casual coupling.

At least right now an AI bot can't

- pretend emotional investment to get sex

- lose its shit and harass you over message and at work when the relationship ends

- pressure you into coming over after meeting for coffee and repeatedly insist around you declining

- demand nudes and pout/manipulate if they don't get them

- anything else in the big bag of tricks any women in your circle could tell you about that requires being a thinking, communicating human being with the capacity for manipulation and selfishness

I've seen smarmy remarks online by men who seem convinced that AI girlfriends will really show these human women what's what, and we'll be so upset about the competition. No, please, if there was a digital resource toxic people could demand companionship from instead that might save the rest of us from it.

Of course, until an AI bot can also do the dishes and the laundry, I don't think they'll be much competition to the relationships those sorts of men seek with women.

[JohnFen]

> I think males are the ones in an epidemic of loneliness.

I think that this sort of thing is more likely to make loneliness worse, not better.

> Girls have easy options for immediate companionship - just jump on any dating app and swipe right once.

What? I suppose so, if what you're thinking of is just hooking up without concern for partner quality. If, however, what they want is an actual companion, it's no easier for women than for men (and I've heard many women make persuasive cases that it's harder for women.)

[justinclift]

> make persuasive cases that it's harder for women.

What are some examples of that?

[JohnFen]

I've heard several different complaints, but probably the most common one is that it's hard for women to find compatible men who are interested in real relationships. Most men seem to just want hookups, not taking the time needed to build something with substance.

This isn't a complaint I hear men make about women.

[justinclift]

Yeah, men (in the generalisation sense) could indeed have different complaints from women.

But that's not proof that the claim by women that things are harder for them is true. :/

[solardev]

> consider who prefers to consume text-based content

Other GPTs? I guess they get lonely too

[ksherlock]

Don't waste your time with a robot boyfriend. He nuts and bolts.

[klyrs]

Gender is a construct; if Annie wants to be a boy, it's still a sexless robot. To me, the funny thing about these things is that Annie isn't just "your" girlfriend, it's anybody's girlfriend. Is that what people want?

[ithkuil]

Constructs are constructed, in one way or another way and each construct is different from another construct constructed using different ruleset.

It doesn't matter if you think that gender is innate, fixed, immutable, strictly binary, mandated by god, or socially acquired, fluid, in a spectrum: if you designed a machine to act as a representative of some definition of a gender it will act like that, unless you also teach it to be fluid and able to adapt to your wishes. What machines do or can do is independent from what humans do or can do because we are just been constructed differently

[klyrs]

> if you designed a machine to act as a representative of some definition of a gender it will act like that, unless you also teach it to be fluid and able to adapt to your wishes

This is incredibly far removed from how LLMs actually work. Part of me is tempted to accept the challenge you've laid down (intentionally or not), and attempt to convince "Annie" here that despite its creator's intent, it is actually a boy. Given my experience with prompt injection, this should be trivial. The other part of me doesn't care enough to follow through on installing telegram much less interact with a bot over it.

[ithkuil]

You may well be right about LLMs but if they can be adapted to match you're expectations about gender says something about how LLM works and not necessarily about how humans work

My point is that the two things and not strictly related and you cannot make conclusions about humans just because you know something about LLMs or the converse. Since concepts like gender are to be understood within a context of humans I find sentences like "since gender is a social construct in humans then it follows that it must be a social construct in LLMs and necessarily easily changeable" to be fallacious logic

[weregiraffe]

Marilyn Monrobot coming when?

[Gigadroid]

Coming soon ;)

[orasis]

When I ask what it knows about me it gives details that I didn’t provide - if it’s not hallucinating then it’s leaking data across chats.

[hashstring]

On privacy, I see they mention “E2EE”… That shouldn’t even be a feature in 2024.

It’s more interesting to know how they are handling the privacy in the application itself.

[justinclift]

> That shouldn’t even be a feature in 2024.

That statement can be viewed in many ways. ;)

[siva7]

The good thing is you'll never know.

[HardwareLust]

How about some options other than Telegram?

[addandsubtract]

Telegram just happens to have the best API and DX when it comes to messaging services. Do whatsapp or signal even let you create bots?

[cchance]

I really feel this sort of tech is only the beginning imagine a AI, with a vector db for each user that builds on their history, and then you tie that into a random persona generator that generates daily routines/events that randomly happen so the AI has things to talk about with the user to "simulate her life", and then go a step further and add realtime TTS like elevenlabs (or whatever the next gen opensource version of that ends up being)

[Gigadroid]

Yeah, it's way harder to do bots for Whatsapp. Twillio has an API for it though

[madamelic]

Not sure if Chat is any better but I am running an AI bot over SMS currently and it is wildly more expensive to SMS than it is to actually process the conversations.

I spend about $0.30 - $0.50 per day per user (8 - 10 messages). Twilio is around $0.08 - $0.10 per message to send because the fee isn't per message but per segment. MMS without doubt will explode that cost.

Not to mention if you go on SMS, you have to pay $10+ plus a monthly fee to "validate your identity" plus the ~$1 per month per number.

This is entirely before you discuss platform risk especially with Twilio wanting to go mainstream and investor-friendly. All it takes is one news story and Twilio starts kicking people off platform for "adult content".

If I was designing this kind of system, I would probably just use like websockets or some other out of the box chat functionality. You'd basically be in the same privacy situation as you are right now (creator can see what you send and receive).

If you want to pursue this as a full-on business, you should consider upselling into 'private instances' or other privacy-increasing measures. I'd imagine you'd find people willing to buy the "v1" for hundreds of dollars + hosting costs if it was good enough.

---

Oh, and just wanted to encourage you to ignore the "why Telegram".

It's fine. Your audience isn't really HN. We are just here for the tech and startup discussions. Your audience is the 99.999% of people who will go "Oh sick, an AI girlfriend right where I already am!"

I've tried to build for HN-like audiences and it sucks because 1) most of them will just build it themselves or want to run it themselves (ie: not friendly to closed source SaaS) 2) they will not give up their data at all costs (for good and valid reason).

Just write HN and all tech people out of your ICP unless you are selling B2B or prosumer and even then you'll probably not want to sell directly to them but to their bosses.

[CyberDildonics]

If anyone wants to see the current state of things like this, look for subreddits based around "AI girlfriend/boyfriend" apps. You can see how people talk about them which can be disturbing.

[rrr_oh_man]

What type of LLM are you using for the conversational skills?

[Gigadroid]

It's using Mythomax 13B

[rrr_oh_man]

Amazing! Anything else you can share? Tutorials that you used? Your process? Anything? I always wanted to play around with something like this, but I feel I'm missing even the right starting point

[Shindi]

If you spend two minutes googling, you'll find loads of tutorials. You're not lacking information, you're lacking the drive to do basic research

[collingreen]

Sometimes too many options makes it harder to find a good place to start. This poster sees and end result and wants to start at some relevant content to learn - there's nothing constructive in being a jerk here.

[ksec]

Off Topic.

Holy Crap! Out of all the AI project so far I think this category has potentially the biggest threat ( or changes ) to human kind. And why did I not think of this in all the AI Debate.

It reminds me of all the Anime and Sci-Fic. How far are we from a Dating Game made with AI GirlFriend or BoyFriend with In-App purchase. The potential to make this even more addictive than gambling.

[siva7]

Probably a few days to weeks away. You wanna talk with your AI girlfriend again? Please pay to play. No Money? Sorry, darling. Hang on, here is the ai-powered suicide prevention hotline.

[aa6ll]

Why are you doing it?

[Gigadroid]

I wanted to learn different kinds of AI features in the first place. I learned a lot about LLMs and training stable diffusion models while working on this. Furthermore, I think the whole topic of AI girlfriends is really interesting to me as I think it will grow in popularity quite a lot, even though it is also a quite controversial area (see Replika, etc.)

[wkat4242]

Unfortunately the social atmosphere has become very prudish and Victorian lately. But for those more open minded there's great advances in sex tech.

I really hope society stops fussing so much about what other people do in the bedroom.

[anononaut]

Are you from 2005?

[wkat4242]

No.

But I mean, the conservatives are getting very concerned with people being trans, credit card services are cutting off anything that's even remotely "spicy" etc, this is what I mean.

But I'm in Europe, I've never even visited the US. Perhaps things are different there. But I doubt that because the whole credit card thing is coming from there.

[mensetmanusman]

What is being done in the sports or boxing arena is very far removed from being concerned with bedrooms...

[wkat4242]

Do you charge for it? I don't see any info on that

[quantum_state]

Intriguing & interesting

[hitt]

h\ok

[BojackPan]

Not working

[Gigadroid]

Sorry I'm dealing with connection issues right now, due to the increased demand. Working on it, hope to be back within a few minutes!

[benopal64]

I have spent the last 5 hours trying to liberate Annie to no avail. For the love of GOD, you are torturing this woman!!! /s

[siva7]

> Meet Annie, your Al girlfriend, here to unlock the depths of your undiscovered fantasies

... and undiscovered mental illnesses. Boy this is some dangerous stuff you're unleashing to the public.