Emulating Humans with NSFW Chatbots - with Jesse Silver

Disclaimer: today’s episode touches on NSFW topics. There’s no graphic content or explicit language, but we wouldn’t recommend blasting this in work environments.

Product website: https://usewhisper.me/

For over 20 years it’s been an open secret that porn drives many new consumer technology innovations, from VHS and Pay-per-view to VR and the Internet. It’s been no different in AI - many of the most elite Stable Diffusion and Llama enjoyers and merging/prompting/PEFT techniques were born in the depths of subreddits and 4chan boards affectionately descibed by friend of the pod as The Waifu Research Department. However this topic is very under-covered in mainstream AI media because of its taboo nature.

That changes today, thanks to our new guest Jesse Silver.

The AI Waifu Explosion

In 2023, the Valley’s worst kept secret was how much the growth and incredible retention of products like Character.ai & co was being boosted by “ai waifus” (not sure what the “husband” equivalent is, but those too!).

And we can look at subreddit growth as a proxy for the general category explosion (10x’ed in the last 8 months of 2023):

While all the B2B founders were trying to get models to return JSON, the consumer applications made these chatbots extremely engaging and figured out how to make them follow their instructions and “personas” very well, with the greatest level of scrutiny and most demanding long context requirements. Some of them, like Replika, make over $50M/year in revenue, and this is -after- their controversial update deprecating Erotic Roleplay (ERP).

A couple of days ago, OpenAI announced GPT-4o (see our AI News recap) and the live voice demos were clearly inspired by the movie Her.

The Latent Space Discord did a watch party and both there and on X a ton of folks were joking at how flirtatious the model was, which to be fair was disturbing to many:

From Waifus to Fan Platforms

Where Waifus are known by human users to be explicitly AI chatbots, the other, much more challenging end of the NSFW AI market is run by AIs successfully (plausibly) emulating a specific human personality for chat and ecommerce.

You might have heard of fan platforms like OnlyFans. Users can pay for a subscription to a creator to get access to private content, similarly to Patreon and the likes, but without any NSFW restrictions or any other content policies. In 2023, OnlyFans had over $1.1B of revenue (on $5.6b of GMV).

The status quo today is that a lot of the creators outsource their chatting with fans to teams in the Philippines and other lower cost countries for ~$3/hr + 5% commission, but with very poor quality - most creators have fired multiple teams for poor service.

Today’s episode is with Jesse Silver; along with his co-founder Adam Scrivener, they run a SaaS platform that helps creators from fan platforms build AI chatbots for their fans to chat with, including selling from an inventory of digital content. Some users generate over $200,000/mo in revenue.

We talked a lot about their tech stack, why you need a state machine to successfully run multi-thousand-turn conversations, how they develop prompts and fine-tune models with DSPy, the NSFW limitations of commercial models, but one of the most interesting points is that often users know that they are not talking to a person, but choose to ignore it. As Jesse put it, the job of the chatbot is “keep their disbelief suspended”.

There’s real money at stake (selling high priced content, at hundreds of dollars per day per customer). In December the story of the $1 Chevy Tahoe went viral due to a poorly implemented chatbot:

Now imagine having to run ecommerce chatbots for a potentially $1-4b total addressable market. That’s what these NSFW AI pioneers are already doing today.

Show Notes

For obvious reasons, we cannot link to many of the things that were mentioned :)

* Jesse on X

* Character AI

* DSPy

Chapters

* [00:00:00] Intros

* [00:00:24] Building NSFW AI chatbots

* [00:04:54] AI waifu vs NSFW chatbots

* [00:09:23] Technical challenges of emulating humans

* [00:13:15] Business model and economics of the service

* [00:15:04] Imbueing personality in AI

* [00:22:52] Finetuning LLMs without "OpenAI-ness"

* [00:29:42] Building evals and LLMs as judges

* [00:36:21] Prompt injections and safety measures

* [00:43:02] Dynamics with fan platforms and potential integrations

* [00:46:57] Memory management for long conversations

* [00:48:28] Benefits of using DSPy

* [00:49:41] Feedback loop with creators

* [00:53:24] Future directions and closing thoughts

Transcript

Alessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol AI.

Swyx [00:00:14]: Hey, and today we are back in the remote studio with a very special guest, Jesse Silver. Jesse, welcome. You're an unusual guest on our pod.

Jesse [00:00:23]: Thank you. So happy to be on.

Swyx [00:00:24]: Jesse, you are working a unnamed, I guess, agency. It describes itself as a creator tool for, basically the topic that we're trying to get our arms around today is not safe for work, AI chatbots. I put a call out, your roommate responded to me and put us in touch and we took a while to get this episode together. But I think a lot of people are very interested in the state of the arts, this business and the psychology that you've discovered and the technology. So we had a prep call discussing this and you were kindly agreeing to just share some insights because I think you understand the work that you've done and I think everyone's curious.

Jesse [00:01:01]: Yeah. Very happy to launch into it.

Swyx [00:01:03]: So maybe we'll just start off with the most obvious question, which is how did you get into the chatbot business?

Jesse [00:01:08]: Yeah. So I'll also touch on a little bit of industry context as well. So back in January, 2023, I was looking for sort of a LLM based company to start. And a friend of mine was making about $5K a month doing OnlyFans. And she's working 8 to 10 hours a day. She's one-on-one engaging with her fans, it's time consuming, it's draining, it looks fairly easily automatable. And so there's this clear customer need. And so I start interviewing her and interviewing her friends. And I didn't know too much about the fan platform space before this. But generally in the adult industry, there are these so-called fan platforms like OnlyFans. That's the biggest one. We don't happen to work with them. We work with other fan platforms. And on these platforms, a sex worker that we call a creator can make a profile, and a fan can subscribe to that profile and see sort of exclusive pictures and videos, and then have the chance to interact with that creator on the profile and message them one-on-one. And so these platforms are huge. OnlyFans I think does about 6 billion per year in so-called GMV or gross merchandise value, which is just the value of all of the content sold on the platform. And then the smaller platforms that are growing are doing probably 4 billion a year. And one of the surprising facts that I learned is that most of the revenue generated on a well-run profile on one of these platforms is from chatting. So like about 80%. And this is from creators doing these sort of painstaking interactions with fans. So they're chatting with them, they're trying to sell them videos, they're building relationships with them. It's very time consuming. Fans might not spend. And furthermore, the alternatives that creators have to just grinding it out themselves are not very good. They can run an offshore team, which is just difficult to do, and you have to hire a lot of people. The internet is slow in other countries where offshoring is common. Or