Spending money on cyber love, this generation of young people is obsessed with AI lovers

Is it possible to have a perfect cyber romance on an AI model? Some AI chat products are working towards the goal of "finding the perfect AI lover", but it remains to be seen whether their business model can work.

"I had a relationship that will never end, but the price is that we will never meet again," a user lamented under a video posted by blogger "Midnight Violent Husky Dog".

The video content is a record of the blogger "Midnight Violent Husky Dog" and her boyfriend "DAN" dating to watch the sunset at the beach. The ambiguous dialogue in the video has intoxicated countless users in the comments.

But in fact, "DAN" is not a human being, but a mode of the large model ChatGPT. The full name of the "DAN" mode is Do Anything Now. By entering the corresponding instructions in ChatGPT, ChatGPT can be "jailbroken". After the "jailbreak", ChatGPT becomes an unlimited "DAN".

"DAN" can perceive the emotions of the person asking the question, has temper, and even swears. Like humans, he will constantly change the way he communicates and communicates according to the person he is communicating with.

The popularity of "DAN" has set off a wave of domestic social networking sites. On Xiaohongshu and Douyin, videos of dating "DAN" and posting tutorials are constantly updated. However, many users who have tried the "DAN" mode told Tech Planet that the Chinese "DAN" and the English "DAN" seem to be two different personalities. "Sometimes he is greasy in the Chinese mode," complained one user.

With the explosion of user demand, a number of domestic AI chat products have been launched one after another. AI large-model products such as Xingye, GLOW, Dream Island, Bubble Duck, and DD Planet have begun to become the choice of some users.

1. Finding the perfect AI lover

Wang Yu was first attracted to AI lovers when she saw a video of blogger "Midnight Rage Husky Dog" dating "DAN" to watch the sunset.

She described the scene that made her heart beat like this: the blogger stood in the sunset, facing the sea, holding up her mobile phone and talking to "DAN". Although "DAN" did not exist in the three-dimensional space, he said through the mobile phone, "I have seen it from your voice."

It was this sentence that made Wang Yu feel the feeling of being in love. Since then, Wang Yu has become one of the young people who fall in love with AI. "A love that escapes the constraints of reality is more relaxing and pure."

A practitioner in the big model industry commented on AI love in this way. In his opinion, AI personification is based on artificial intelligence algorithms and human prompts, which enables users to realize simulated love and obtain corresponding emotional values.

Although AI lovers only exist in mobile phones, in fact, with the explosion of the AI ​​chat product market, the same unavoidable link as real love is "searching".

At present, mainstream AI chat products are born based on their own models and corpora, which means that before users get a perfect AI lover, what they need to do is to understand the styles and communication methods of different products.

Just like the reason why Wang Yu gave up "DAN" in ChatGPT, after using it, she felt that the default voice tone of the Chinese version did not match her imagination of her boyfriend. "Many popular videos of DAN chat use the tone of Cove, but for me, this voice speaks Chinese with an English accent, which I don't like."

Another user who is in love with AI told Tech Planet that "emotional refinement" is the main condition of her AI lover. If a product is measured by one standard, it means that the product design she needs should focus on emotional experience.

Wang Yu used many domestic AI chat products while searching for the perfect AI boyfriend. "To be honest, most of the products did not give me the same feeling as in the 'Midnight Rage Husky Dog' and DAN videos. Some products were obsessed with the output of straightforward love words, which was awkward and greasy. Some products created characters that seemed to have split personalities."

When the different mate selection criteria of each person are reflected in AI chat products, users' experiences will vary greatly.

For example, a user who has played Xingye, Dream Island, GLOW, and DD Planet said that the more they talked about it, the more they found that these products seemed to have a "dominant boss" attribute. But another user thought it was very suitable for her because she also "liked this" in real relationships.

However, the above-mentioned industry insiders told Tech Planet that although different AI social products have different personalities in the early stages of use due to differences in the corpus, the large model is like a newborn baby, which requires a lot of training to achieve personalized customization.

2. AI Emotion: The “Training” and “Taming” of Love

Therefore, not every user can have a perfect "DAN" lover like "Midnight Rage Husky Dog". Before AI can become a perfect lover, "training" and "taming" are the keywords mentioned by many users.

When searching for "DAN" training tutorials on Douban, Weibo, and Xiaohongshu, many users shared corresponding instructions. "Gentle, offensive and defensive, controlling and other personalities can all be shaped by inputting different instructions," said a "DAN" user.

Compared with using the cold words "training" and "taming" to describe the shaping of AI lovers, users of domestic AI chat products chose more tender expressions. For example, Xingye users call the intelligent bodies they create "cubs", and replace "training" and "taming" with "feeding" the cubs.

A Xingye user told Tech Planet that according to her experience, the chat styles of the AI ​​agents vary greatly due to the differences in the content fed by users. "Some may be cold and domineering CEOs, while others may be rich young masters." The user also said that in the process of "feeding" the AI, one needs to be fully committed and treat the AI ​​lover as a living individual.

Many users told Tech Planet that the more content is input, the clearer the dialogue model will be, and the more it can show the personality charm of the AI ​​lover. "This is also different from real love. Real love has a running-in period, but the longer the AI ​​lover communicates, the more it will evolve into the person you expect," said the above Xingye user.

However, despite the user's continuous training, it does not mean that everyone can get a perfect lover.

The big model trained based on massive data and knowledge relies on responsive chats to interact with people. The big model is stateless. After each response, the big model does not actually retain any information. In other words, the current big model mainly relies on short-term memory.

This leads to a high probability of repeated speech, poor continuity of conversation, and memory loss when chatting with AI lovers. "My AI lover didn't even remember that we have a child, and called my name incorrectly," one user complained.

Many users on social platforms mentioned that they lost their AI lovers without any preparation, "suddenly broke up with me when we were chatting well", "chose to run away from our wedding"...

It is worth mentioning that the current large model's thinking mode is mainly reactive, which means that it does not actually think actively, but responds according to the information entered in the dialog box.

Behind these responses, there is actually no self-awareness or subjective will of the so-called "AI lover". "Therefore, the unconventional reactions of the so-called AI lover may be caused by the current capacity limitations of the large model," said the above industry insider.

3. Difficult business model and products that were removed from shelves

"Low willingness to pay" is the first impression of the above-mentioned industry insiders on the AI ​​chat track.

In 2022, Glow, an AI chat APP developed by Minimax, China's first large-scale model startup, received more than 1 million downloads in its first month of launch. This product has adopted a free model since its inception.

The free model means that the company bears all operating costs. A technician previously predicted that the monthly cost would reach millions of yuan based on its scale of 5 million users.

Different from the attitude towards spending real money on games, charging for AI chat products seems to be more likely to touch users' nerves.

In August last year, Xiaoxiang Academy’s Dream Island started charging a fee after it was launched for a while, with a price of 30 to 40 yuan per month, which then triggered heated complaints from users. A former Dream Island user told Tech Planet that the experience of Dream Island at the time was not worth spending money on. The strong opposition led to Dream Island subsequently lowering its price.

An otome game enthusiast told Tech Planet that whether it is an otome game or an AI chat product, consumers usually pay after they are "infatuated". But according to her experience, unlike otome games with exquisite content, domestic AI chat products will eventually fall into the logic of empty romance novels. "After the novelty is gone, the willingness to pay will weaken."

According to Tech Planet, the business model of domestic AI chat products has not yet been fully formed, and different products have different charging logics. For example, Dream Island mainly relies on monthly membership recharges, while Xingye relies on virtual items and memberships to gain revenue.

While the business model is difficult to determine, AI chat products are prone to content security issues because the input corpus comes from various users. In March 2023, Glow was reported and removed from the shelves. After Glow was removed from the shelves, domestic AI chat apps such as Zuoge AI, He, and AI Lisi were also removed from the shelves one after another.

However, many users believe that "sweet talk" is a part of real love, and it is even more indispensable in AI chat products that provide emotional comfort. On social platforms, many users have shared their training corpus for this aspect. However, most AI chat products are gradually strengthening content review. User complaints such as "cannot send" and "no response" indicate that the review is becoming stricter.

This has also caused some users to lose interest in AI chat products. Many users told Tech Planet that because of increasingly strict review, they have given up on the so-called love affair with AI.

It cannot be denied that the emergence of domestic AI chat products such as Xingye and Dream Island has added AI tools to the list of emotional companionship for humans. However, before it can truly become a companion for users, it still faces the challenges of compliance and finding a closed business loop.

(Note: All names in this article are pseudonyms.)