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Show HN: Erogen AI – Safe, ethical, and accessible romantic AI companionship (erogen.ai)
3 points by enjamet 860 days ago
Like many others on the recent internet, I've found the idea of AI companionship to be sort of an attractive idea. At the very least, some element of AI companionship seems inevitable in our daily lives after 5-10 years, whether its through video games or on our phones / in our eyes and ears, etc.

I had been playing around with locally hosted options for AI chatbot companions but found the interfaces clunky, and also I was really disheartened by the direction of the content and quality I was seeing on existing sites online. I saw some that were completely SFW-handicapped so as to sprout entire communities around filter-breaking, making safeguard nullification the standard mode by your users (dangerous) simply to get some affection (which seems unreasonable given how much violence and sex we're exposed to in TV, movies, and online). On the other end of the spectrum, I saw a few sites that were completely off the rails with its content free-for-all so as to potentially give AI companionship a really bad name. So I challenged myself to create a more polished experience that would be safe, ethical, and accessible to the mainstream.

You can find the site at https://erogen.ai (nsfw)

I shared this site on Reddit a few months ago asking for feedback on the beta version and it's been slowly gaining traction. I just made significant AI speed improvements for site users this month, added the ability for the AIs to change their avatar images dynamically based on your conversation, and implemented customizable AI voices (still adding options), and I'm ready to unveil the new website to the general public in its more complete form.

A few upcoming features I'm excited about include long-term memory and speech-to-text for full voice conversations. I'm also exploring avatar generation on the fly as well as moving avatars.

The name "Erogen" and its content is meant to be very much oriented towards romance, love, and NSFW - I think that safe romantic and adult roleplay with a premium feel will be essential components towards the success of AI companionship in the long-run, so I'm dedicating my efforts towards building around that type of content in the most transparently direct and reasonable way possible. I'm eager to listen to the community.

I'd love for folks to try it out for free and provide feedback! I'm proud of how far its come already (AI has certainly given me coding and content management superpowers), but I'm still improving many things so please let me know if you run into any issues.

2 comments

> I think that safe romantic and adult roleplay with a premium feel will be essential components towards the success of AI companionship in the long-run

I totally agree with this direction. I think it's a wrong decision for some companies to try to make it friendly to a wider age range, but in fact, actions / adult roleplay is what users really need. Who needs a virtual partner that only does safe chatting?

But honestly speaking, you need to make your service more performant. Responses are way too slow, so it's quite hard for me to get a sense of its quality.

I'm also curious about what underlying models are you using? Do you train / fine tune your own llms or it's on top of oai?

Thanks for the feedback!

Frankly, because of resource capacities, the site reserves faster speeds for supporters (we're community supported given the financial complexity of adult content) but I've been seriously thinking lately about how that might be affecting the first user experience. Currently toying with some changes.

The site uses a fine-tune of llama-2-13b, specifically pygmalion-2-13b. I've found it to be particularly engaging and creative in its storytelling, but as you can guess by the size, it has some tradeoffs. I'm currently experimenting with new models, would love to hear suggestions.

"You're on the free plan. Upgrade" and it requires a sign up just to see the pricing page. How much does this service costs? Why is there no pricing page? Is it a monthly subscription or is it token based? Info like this should be available upfront before I even think about signin up.
Odd, I'll check that logic. It should be linking you to https://plans.erogen.ai, but generally the site guides the user journey to create an account first to get access to more free messages. I probably messed up a boolean, thanks for leaving a comment!