I think maybe there needs to be a new word. It's still an asymmetric relationship. It's kind of a mix of DMing an influencer and chatting with the barista because you think she actually likes you. You're talking to a mirage.

I think “parasocial” still captures part of it (one-to-many distribution, performer vibe), but there’s also a true interactive dyad here. It’s closer to “synthetic social interaction” or “responsive parasocial.” I don’t have a perfect word yet, but the asymmetry and the responsiveness both matter.

You need to first prove that AI is not conscious.

I find it hard to even convince others that I am a conscious person.

Maybe consciousness is just a matter of belief, if I see this AI and believe that it's a person, then I am talking to a conscious entity.

For real-time: we use WebRTC for streaming. Input is streaming STT, then a low-latency LLM, then TTS, then we drive Live2D parameters on the client. Lip sync: we currently do (simple phoneme / amplitude-based) and are testing viseme extraction. Rhubarb is on our list, but we’re cautious about added latency.

It will quickly distill down to clients using the service just for sex and sex-adjacent activities.

No kink-shaming, but this sort of thing enables self-destructive hard-to-return-from anti-social behaviour.

Totally fair reaction. We’re building this with clear boundaries: we don’t position it as therapy replacement, we add safety rails, and gives user a choice what mode they want and guardrails differ based on this. Plus, age restriction is there as safety boundary

realtime api + elevenlabs but llms will be diversified based on persona moving forward. Using chatgpt/gemini as baseline model, we feel prompting has limitation

Appreciate it. If you try it and anything feels off (latency, turn-taking, uncanny moments), I’d love concrete feedback. That’s what we’re grinding on right now.

Same place as my latency budget: disappearing fast.

yess you can have her 24/7!

You're describing Parasocial interaction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

far from being impossible, it's the entire influencer economy. This form of social media has been extremely widespread for a decade or so running; it's probably the dominant form of social media.

100% agree. Maximizing intimacy and scaling distribution pull in opposite directions. We’re experimenting with keeping the “character” consistent while letting personalization live in private memory and user-controlled settings. Still early, and this tension is real.