[dingnuts]

the good news is that this shit isn't sustainable. when investor funtime subsidies end, ain't nobody spending $2000/mo for an AI boyfriend.

"but it's getting cheaper and cheaper to run inference" they say. To which I say:

ok bud sure thing, this isn't a technology governed by Moore. We'll see.

[fullshark]

Mental health issues in the population are never going away, people using software tools to prey on those with issues is never going away. Arguably the entire consumer software industry preys on addiction and poor impulse control already.

[dingnuts]

yeah, I know, I'm addicted to this hellhole of a site. I hate it but I still open it every five minutes.

But that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking specifically about people who've made a SoTA model their buddy, like the people who were sad when 4o disappeared. Users of character.ai. That sort of thing. It's going to get very, very expensive and provides very little value. People are struggling with rent. These services won't be able to survive, I hope, purely through causing psychosis in vulnerable people.

[valbaca]

> ain't nobody spending $2000/mo for an AI boyfriend

you haven't met the Whales (big spenders) in the loneliness-epidemic industry (e.g. OnlyFans and the like)

[dingnuts]

why would they stop paying for the attention of a real woman when the artificial alternative costs just as much?

[evilduck]

Reliability and consistency? Humans have bad days. Humans have needs and can't be available 24/7/365 for years on end. OF creators burn out or grow up or lose interest or cash out and retire.

It's not like the "real women" of OnlyFans are consistently real, or women. And there's some percentage that are already AI-by-proxy. There's definitely opportunity for someone to just skip the middleman.

[AlexandrB]

Both are fake. Do you think OnlyFans models are actually giving their customers their attention?

[JohnMakin]

On OF specifically, you are much more likely to be spending money talking to a bot that sends you sexy pics and messages than a real human being.

[BoredPositron]

When I was at a game studio for a big MMORPG I had the valuable experience sitting next to the monetization team. It was a third grade MMO with gacha mechanics our whales spend 20-30k every month... for years.

[nullc]

It doesn't require a particularly powerful AI because the human's own hope is doing the heavy lifting. 70B models run juust fine on hardware you can have sitting under your desk.

[tokai]

People have spend much more on pig butchering scam boyfriends that don't even exist. I bet you could get some people to pay quit a lot to keep what they see as their significant other alive.

[deadbabe]

$2000? I see $4000/month minimum, roughly equivalent to what some typical Wall Street data feeds are priced at. It’s big business.