Nowadays, you can choose to spend your early morning hours having sweet (or not-so-sweet) conversations with anyone, as long as you’re comfortable with them being a digital personality and are willing to pay for the experience. .

One provider of such services is dream gfmakes the tempting promise of finding your virtual girlfriend in just a few clicks.

This comes as a growing number of influencers are realizing that creating virtual avatars to talk to fans on their behalf can be a time-saving and lucrative side hustle.

So how does this work, and perhaps more importantly, what does it mean for the future of relationships between actual living, breathing humans?

I decided to chat with two DreamGF executives to find out.

AI generated girlfriend

DreamGF allows users to design and try to build a relationship with their girlfriend’s image and personality built entirely by generative AI.

Users can choose from a variety of physical attributes, including hair length, ethnicity, age, and breast size. You can also choose from a much smaller set of personality attributes to decide whether she is a personality attribute or not. Lewd, Mistressor nurse.

Once she appears in the digital universe, they can chat with her, including sexting, and can also ask her to send them X-rated photos.

Although there is an option to select lesbian as a personality trait, it is clear that this service is designed for straight men. However, I heard that a DreamBF version is in development.

Image generation is handled by the open source Stable Diffusion engine. A clever innovation is that coding tricks have been used to overcome the fact that it is often difficult to create consistent-looking characters using AI image generators.

However, to handle chat functionality, DreamGF trained and deployed its own large-scale language model. This was necessary because commonly used LLMs such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 do not allow adult content.

The technical wizardry doesn’t end there. It is also possible for the user to receive voice messages from her AI girlfriend.

Although it is styled and sold as date With hands-on experience, it quickly becomes clear that the primary use case is the provision of adult entertainment. This is a fact that DreamGF CEO Georgi Dimitrov and his VP of Business Development Jeff Dillon were happy to acknowledge when they participated in a recent webinar discussion.

business case

It’s clear there’s a business case here. After all, much of the internet is built on pornography and selling sex.

Dimitrov and Dillon both come from the adult industry, from running an OnlyFans agency to payment processing, NFT projects, and developing electronic sex toys.

With a wealth of accumulated insight into the direction of the adult entertainment industry, the two believe that AI is the future.

However, OnlyFans’ success is built on allowing viewers to have (seemingly) one-on-one relationships with content creators, which is also central to this business model.

“Now we can be more transparent and say, ‘You’re chatting with an AI version of me,'” Dillon said. More on this later.

So far, things seem to be going well from a business perspective. Although the service only recently launched, it has around 10,000 paying users and, perhaps more importantly, an 80% retention rate. It also offers a free trial, and in total he has created over 6 million virtual girlfriends and shared around 20 million messages with his human partners.

Dillon said: “It’s clear that there are a lot of people who are fascinated by this technology, and they just want to try it out and see how it works because it’s interesting.

“But in reality, many people end up staying with their AI girlfriends for a long time.”

Dimitri added, “If you look at the market, there are many image generators and text chats out there, but one that provides a complete end-to-end experience to create a girlfriend, chat with her, and request content. There is no solution,” he adds. ”

social and ethical implications

The growing popularity of services based on enabling relationships and sex with AI clearly raises a number of ethical questions.

Dillon and Dimitrov say they are more comfortable fostering relationships with AI than with OnlyFans models and influencers, as many OnlyFans models lie about the fact that they engage directly with their fans. .

Dillon is happy to talk about the open secrets of that particular platform. But it’s an Indian man.

“I felt at one point that we were essentially being lied to…and the answer for me was AI.”

However, this is clearly just the beginning of the ethical issues raised by the existence of such services.

The platform has taken steps to ensure that it cannot be used to generate illegal content, for example featuring underage characters. It also prevents users from creating virtual girlfriends based on real people. This is done by abstracting the image generation prompt from the user through the site’s user interface.

Dimitrov said, “We can’t just force people to write exactly what they want…because we’re going to get a lot of celebrities and kids…this is something we don’t want in the hands of our users.” I don’t want to leave it up to them.” ”

The chat algorithm itself is designed to detect and ban words associated with child pornography.

“There are a lot of people who are interested in this kind of thing…and we’re fighting with all the technology we have. This is our safety net,” he says.

Other questions, such as whether users’ ability to form real relationships are at risk of starting unhealthy or toxic relationships, are not easily solved by technology alone.

Once men, especially relatively young and immature men, have gotten used to the idea of ​​a virtual girlfriend who is basically programmed to give them whatever they want, this may change the way they view and treat real women. How will it affect you?

Dillon’s answer to this is that new technologies are often a double-edged sword, and while there may be negative consequences for some, this needs to be balanced with the potential for positive change. That’s what it is.

he says: “It’s like, ‘Hey, I’m kind of used to this convenience that technology has given us.'”

“They’re used to talking to girls who can say, ‘I want a submissive girl.’ [and then] In real life, they build a relationship, but she is not so submissive, and, as you know, some adjustment period will occur for some people.

“But one of the great things is that it can be used for a variety of purposes. This could be used for relationship therapy…A lot of people are afraid to share what’s going on in their real lives. But when you talk to an AI… you’re just talking to a robot, so it’s much more comfortable to share your emotions.”

The future of virtual girlfriends

Whatever your views on the moral or ethical implications, I think it’s clear that the AI ​​sex and relationships industry is here, and for better or worse, it’s not going away anytime soon. Masu.

At DreamGF, the immediate focus will be on digitizing real-life models and creating hybrid girlfriends that exist in real life as well as AI-generated avatars on your computer or smartphone screen. .

Dillon said, “We have these models that have huge fan bases…Now we can create an AI version of Star X. Now she can point her fans to this AI version of herself, and the fans will Being able to interact with her now…that’s probably going to be a big step for us going forward.”

In fact, DreamGF plans to have its first hybrid AI model up and running in the coming weeks.

Additionally, there are videos. For now, this is the holy grail for many generative AI platforms, but it’s easy to foresee a time in the relatively near future when you’ll be able to video chat with your AI girlfriends (and boyfriends) in real time.

And further into the future? Well, there are robots.

Dimitrov said: “The most exciting thing… [virtual girlfriend] – Chat history and everything, the whole experience – and we put that into something like a real robot.

“In Japan…we can create lifelike robots with human characteristics…I think it will probably take 10 or 20 years. [virtually]but it can physically appear before your eyes… and you can interact with it in real life.

“This feature is exciting on the one hand, but also very scary on the other.”

I don’t think he’s the only one!

you can click here Check out my full conversation with DreamGF’s Georgi Dimitrov and Jeff Dillon. There, some of the ethical issues surrounding the AI ​​sex and relationships industry are explained in more detail and what the future holds.