Differences between the AI sex chat and the general chatbots are described in three aspects: core technology, training data and user interaction. Employing the model architecture as example, Replika’s AI sex chat function, founded on GPT-4 tuning (1.8 trillion parameters), is 1,500 times more complex than a typical customer service bot (e.g., IBM Watson’s 120 million parameters), and costs $4.3 million per model to train (compared to $680,000 for a typical chatbot). MIT 2023 testing showed that the AI sex chat had an emotion detection rate of 89% (65% for conventional robots), a response speed of ≤0.8 seconds (1.5 seconds for conventional robots), and a context memory length of 50 conversation rounds (12 rounds for conventional robots).
Sensitivity and data training scales are quite distinct. AI sex chat’s vocabulary contains 45% of the NSFW content data (i.e., the r/sex category of Reddit) and 5% for ordinary bots. The corpus that has been labeled by Anima App takes up 12,000 sexual psychology situation (compared to 800 ordinary situations for ordinary customer support robots) and yields 1.2 MB of data from each user per day (0.3 MB for ordinary robots). But the cost of compliance is greater: the probability of violation by AI sex chat platform is 32% (7% for regular robots), and the average penalty is 4.5% of revenue (1.2% for regular robots).
User behavior patterns are vastly different. Users of AI sex chat interact 8.3 times per day (2.1 times for normal bots), and they engage for 14.2 minutes each time (3.5 minutes for normal bots). On paid conversions, Replika’s sex chat AI added membership subscription price to 18% (compared to 5% for the base version), and premium services were $29.90 / month (average price of a regular bot value-added service is $9.9). But there are risks: the Stanford HAI study found that 23% of consumers of AI sex chat grew emotionally addicted (compared to 3% of consumers of standard robots), and 9% of 18- to 24-year-olds lost actual social abilities (compared to 2% of the control group).
The moral issues of technology are worse. AI sex chat’s whitelisted set of sensitive words has 12,000 items (3,000 for regular bots), but with a high error rate of 9% (2% for regular bots). An OpenAI internal audit of GPT-4-powered AI sex chat resulted in the generation of morally offensive content (e.g., violent suggestions) in 0.7% of the conversation, compared to 0.1% for regular bots. The violation of privacy is more severe too: in one of the platform breaches, the black market price for AI sex chat logs was $0.45 per item ($0.1 for regular chat logs), and 67% of the leaked information contained biometrics (e.g., heart rate variability).
Different market positioning and growth potential. The total size of AI sex chat in 2023 is 620 million US dollars (growth rate of 34% annually), and the user segmentation by age and sex is 68% men aged 18-35 years; The legacy market of chatbots (customer support and education) is $4.8 billion (12% growth rate), and the sex split of users is even (51% male and 49% female). There is a significant difference in technology iteration pace: AI sex chat’s algorithms are updated every six weeks (every quarter for other robots), whereas the compliance review cycle takes up to 14 weeks (six weeks for other robots).
In the future, differential privacy and federated learning technologies may be the tipping points for AI sex chat – IBM believes the former can reduce data breach risk by 65%, and the latter can reduce the cost of compliance in model training by 42%. But the core of the contradiction remains: the users’ need for “true emotions” and the ethical safety red line should still be balanced between social acceptance and technological progress.