I don’t want an AI girlfriend, I just want to think out loud to another person. It helps me think and solve problems on my own. I feel like AI should be perfect for that. However the couple I’ve seen advertised and tried out… Well they essentially are only programmed to be like:
“Let’s change the subject. Maybe this picture will help” blured picture behind a $50 subscription pay wall
And I’m like “no… If I wanted to change the subject I wouldn’t be talking about this subject. I’m not at all interested in $50 AI tits.”
I have a very low bar of expectations. Even if the AI just responds “wow, that’s crazy” to everything that would probably be fine for my needs. More would be better but I do not need lewd pictures and I’m not paying $50 a month lol.
Honestly chatgpt with memory is pretty great, although privacy wise I’m very careful with what I say.
If you care about privacy more than your AI friend being smart try Claude or Mistral but that’s a significant downgrade in conversational quality.
Eliza
Why not simply host your own LLM and leverage that beefy gaming GPU you very likely own to do the work?
I mean, ChatGPT?
If you need a personality, try HammerAI. You can create your own characters using explicitly SFW models (I mean NGL most of the public models are porn, but there are normal ones too). It all runs locally so you have a lot of control over it… Not as flashy as others, of course.
Literally any of the major LLMs.
I send a lot of stuff through co-pilot and I’ve never gotten anything remotely sexual with it set to precise mode.
Do keep in mind that running your personal thoughts, questions, and ideas through an AI will probably get your personal thoughts, questions, and ideas fed into their marketing system.
If you have a half decent Nvidia card and some spare time to wait for responses to come back self-hosting Ollama isn’t that difficult.
You could actually set your own guardrails up. in the config you could set up some post instructions for every prompt specifically instructing it not to get emotional.
The YouTuber Network Chuck recently did a decent video covering the set up and guardrail security.
Network Chuck
God, thanks for the IT class PTSD flashback. Idk why but Network Chuck is so annoying for me. The way he just shills his coffee. Sorry Chuck
LOL, he’s corny and tries to be a little too flashy. But at least he gets to the point quickly and tends to cover all the basics without shooting off into a useless tangent. (sans the coffee)
This is the first time I think I’ve ever mentioned him as reference material, but it was mostly because he covered the guardrail concept that no one else I’ve watched talked about.
You can probably just use any of the big chat programs, and just start out by telling it you want it to converse with you like it’s just another person.
Gemini has that “live” feature where you can talk out loud and it sounds like you’re talking to a real person. Combining that with pre-prompting for casual conversation is fairly convincing.
I’ll try that one too. Thank you.
Ive been out of the loop with AI stuff, I never thought much about them until I saw the AI girlfriend ads on you tube. Then I started thinking that might be perfect for thinking out loud and figuring stuff out.
It very quickly became clear the girlfriend aps are programmed exclusively (and lazily ) for lonely horny people. I probably should have expected that from the ads but I figured if it’s AI it could learn commands like “stop trying to change the subject to boobs”… Nope…
Just be aware that the Gemini is rather limited in the logic department, even as chat bots go.
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/15216066-2dfd-46c7-b734-ad8687196dd5.jpeg
ELIZA? Or maybe just a rubber duck as used by programmers.
Tell me more about rubber duck…
That’s interesting, why do you suppose <S> ?
Yes, this is exactly what I’ve found them to be the most useful for.
Here’s a list:
- ChatGPT
Lemmy will hate me for this, but it remains the best chat it there is, especially if you subscribe to the pro version. There’s different models but essentially it’s just a good bot that will be really helpful giving you feedback on thoughts and ideas.
A to A- tier
- Gemini
Google AI chat bot which seems to be well received recently. I will be an asshole an assume it’s not gonna be quite as good but it looks like they’re sticking out now.
A- to B+ tier
- Bing / Copilot
Microsoft’s AI attempt. It is an AI but it’s only OK. Might get enough out of it for your purpose but it already has a long list of hiccups recorded so this is not something I would hang my head on all the time. Because it’s got bing integration, generally the AI assisted search can be helpful though.
B tier
- Llama on huggingface
Basically an open source alternative to ChatGPT done well, although not quite as good. This Facebook’s work which they are graciously providing free of charge for everyone to enjoy and tinker with. Huggingface is great because you will always find live demos of all the models there so if you are not a power user, in a limited way you can use this model on the website.
Between B and C tier
- Llama self setup
Llama is open source so it is possible to set it up yourself. Using the webui it is possible to do this on your own PC, removing the limitations for conversation speed and message counts. You will be struggling if your graphics card can’t entertain the model though (good models eat vram for breakfast). If you have it setup, you will always get the best experience out of the Llama models which might make this worth it.
C tier
Other than those there are a lot of sites offering subscriptions to what is basically a different frontend for chatgpt or other open source models, which is arguably worse than all the options mentioned. There might be some gems in the rough but I haven’t looked too far into it. This should give you an introductory overview though which is presumably more helpful to you.
I personally use ChatGPT and I am starting to appreciate it a lot. It does still lead ahead of Llama or anything else.
After reading your comments, it looks like what you’re looking for is an AI that remembers your conversations. Generally an AI can only “remember” a specific amount of tokens (words iirc) and it will have amnesia about the rest.
I think the bigger Llama models will have high token cutoff as well as copilot (?) don’t quote me on that tho.
We’re not at the point where an AI will remember details for over a year from one conversation but if you always open a new conversation for a specific topic, you will already be able to get 90% of the way to where you want.
Good luck on your endeavors ;)
I think the benefit of third party AI services is exactly a way around that limited context window. The service can summarize the previous conversations and key facts about the user, store it and feed that back into the AI prompt.
Instead of wasting most of the context window for pages and pages of conversation, it can just prompt the AI with something like “the user is called Timmy, he works as an accountant, he has a girlfriend called Tammy, yesterday he told you that he thinks about proposing.”.
I think even ChatGPT does something like that, but as it’s a very general tool it might not be the best in filtering out information that is relevant for a “personal” conversation.
No Claude? It’s pretty good in my experience, and I follow someone on twitter who does absolutely wild things with it.
Wow, that’s crazy
whatever happened to chatrooms, simple meditation, or therapy? it’d be better if your personal drama didn’t emit as much carbon dioxide as your commute
I’ve never seen pi.ai do the things you describe
I will check that one out when I have a moment. I bookmarked it. Thank you.
I guess I should also add for clarity that I’m aware there are chatbots for free out there that can answer questions.
That’s also not really what I’m looking for either. I don’t need “how can I brew my own mead”
I’m looking for something in the middle. An AI that responds and remembers previous conversations we’ve had, not pushy with solutions but not a placation machine.
I’m not looking to pretend it’s real, or that we are in love. A tool to express my thoughts out loud mostly to myself but more interactive than a bathroom mirror.
Edit: again to clarify. I mentioned my low bar expectation of “wow, that wild”. My high bar, what I really a looking for is an AI that gives responses like “that sounds similar to the problem you mentioned last week, how did you handle that?”
So I can be like “yeah it is kinda similar, I didn’t think about that”
That would be the high bar. I’d pay maybe $5 for that experience.
Final clarifying edit: after reading my own post I’m thinking to myself, if this was posted by someone else I’d answer with something like:
“Sounds like you’re describing a therapist. AI therapists have a lot of issues but real human ones are getting cheaper with online appointments”
And that would be a very fair answer. Although I might benefit from a therapist, we all would. I’m talking more about mundane daily thoughts and talking to a therapist daily even online would be expensive.
RTX chat
If you have a computer and graphics card you could try some local llms. They are pretty awesome and you get to keep your days. I use oobabooga and stable diffusion with Silly Tavern as the glue to hold it together. I get model cards from character Hub
