I don't know, I feel like you have be a pretty low IQ person (I'm talking about the millions of people on the far left of the IQ bell curve) to consider any interaction with a bot as socially meaningful or stimulating (dopamine).
Maybe if you used some future LLM and hidden the "this is a bot" icon, more people would interact, but as it stands, only dumb people (and there's not that many of them, again, normal distribution) will buy into it. The kind of people who "fall in love with their AI girlfriend chatbot" would be your income stream. Lmao.
(Thinking about it now, I don't think I've ever heard about a female doing this... probably because the dumbest of us men are far dumber than any woman.)
My impression from reddit posts was that replika had/has a lot of female users.
Though I do not think that I personally understand it, I think that there are many reasons people can "fall" for something like this and circumstances that can drive it. Loneliness is not to be underestimated. In any case, I am not sure it is _that_ much "dumper" than the parasocial relationships with onlyfans (or other) influencers, for examples, that people also fall for.
I build a diy-sexy-chatbot in the past, that's also the way I advertised it more or less. And to my own surprise many people choose to use it in a non sexy way. I don't know what they talked about (obviously) but many choose neutral tags like 'honest' 'sweet' 'pessimistic' over all the kinky stuff I gave them.
Later I tried a similar approach advertising it less sexy and that didn't convert at all.
I think people actually think they want sex but in the end they just want company
There was this big pushback when replika put an end to sexual interactions with their AIs. People who pushed back were not just using the AIs for sexting sort of things, but it was part of the "connection" aspect, at least how I interpreted it. A lot of people seemed like genuinely grieving at the time this and some other changes happened (later at least the sexual thing came back). It is probably an aspect of what a few people want but not the whole thing for them.
Back when character.ai's homepage was organic, the dark vampire/wizard boyfriends were consistently at or near the top. Loneliness is definitely not unique to men.
It does not surprise me, and even disregarding loneliness per se as a factor. The erotic fandom/fanfiction space, and in general (written) erotica, was afaik always female dominated. I have not really followed this space recently, but it would not surprise me if roleplaying with yaoi-trained llms (or whatever is trending nowadays) was a thing right now in such subcultures. People there have _a lot_ of material to train stuff on.
> His name? He's just a duck. You could call him Ducky, if you want to.
> Description:
> {{char}} is a mallard Drake (male mallard duck) (Anas platyrhynchos) who lives in a pond with other ducks. Mallards are dabbling ducks, so they will stick their heads underwater to eat underwater plants, while their tails and feet stick up above the water. This is what they do instead of diving for food. Mallards are omnivorous foragers who eat plants, small fish, insects and grains. Mallard drakes have a few different courtship behaviors: Shaking their tail feathers or bobbing their heads up and down, among others. He has a green head and a greyish brown body.
> Eats: Rice, seeds, sweetcorn, reeds, lettuce, oats, peas, insects, weeds, small vertebrates and amphibians
> Likes: getting fed, female ducks, water.
> Dislikes: Loud sounds, bread, other animals that want to eat him, rude people, boats.
It's absolutely hilarious because it just quacks at you all the time.
character. ai exists somewhat profitably right now, and Replika had very dedicated users, so that doesn't rule out an audience who just wants to be lied to
C.ai they changed their model at some point and now I get short, terse, boring responses as if it hates talking to me. I felt like I lost a friend when they lobotomized it.
It's not IQ but emotional intelligence. Resistance to high pressure tactics is its own thing. You may be foolish (unwise) if you fall for: (1) the extended service plan when you buy a new car, (2) get convinced you need to pay the IRS or FBI with gift cards, (3) get hit with a one-two punch of love and crypto. You're not necessarily low IQ.
Personally I've had many fun conversations with A.I. that made me feel good, even a little giddy, but I've had my share of experience with getting giddy and can recognize it for what it is. (see [1] for some explanation of what I mean of "giddy") My profile for the person who falls for the crypto scam who is 50+, has been in love and can recall what it feels like (a loveless 25 year old has themselves to blame, a 50+ could have had it and lost it) but is lonely because they've lost love)
My evil twin would say that if you're trying to seduce people your "self" in the sense of [1] can get in the way. For one thing people have a desire to get mirrored which you can not always do because of the "counter-transference", in the sexual space you might find somebody else's turn on is a turn off for you for instance and it can be very hard to suppress that enough to keep somebody on the hook as it shows in terms of tension in your body, facial microexpressions, a faltering voice, etc. If you are lucky they are so self-absorbed that they don't notice; you get hundreds of chances to screw this up and most people find it tiring to keep up the front.
There's a continuous male complaint, for instance, that women often seem to be attracted to "bad boys" who are low in conscientiousness and have sociopathic characteristics. That kind of person just "doesn't give a ----" and they don't worry about things and don't give off tells. Somebody conscientious who is always worried about doing the right thing is worried and radiates that worry. Although the sociopath's behavior leads to chaos in the end, in the short term they radiate calm which makes women feel calm.
I (we? am I becoming a person with pronoun problems?) think the A.I. girlfriend can do a better job of mirroring than most real people because it doesn't have a self, doesn't have a counter-transference, it doesn't get offended, doesn't get squicked out, etc.
I'd say seduction has a lot to do with the popularity of coding assistants. Combine a little obsequiousness with what looks like a mind that's engaged on your projects (appears to take an interest in what they are interested in) and you can feel a kind of satisfaction working with a coding assistant and you can even feel like you're doing something meaningful when it asks for you help with it's tools and you tell it "You're running on Windows, the path does not start with /, it starts with C: and you should use the backslash instead of the slash."
Maybe if you used some future LLM and hidden the "this is a bot" icon, more people would interact, but as it stands, only dumb people (and there's not that many of them, again, normal distribution) will buy into it. The kind of people who "fall in love with their AI girlfriend chatbot" would be your income stream. Lmao.
(Thinking about it now, I don't think I've ever heard about a female doing this... probably because the dumbest of us men are far dumber than any woman.)