Author|James

If you still remember the 315 Galas in the past few years, you will know that in the fields of live show broadcasts and pay-to-win online games, there are a large number of "shills" - for example, in live show broadcasts, those female anchors who make the big brothers' hearts beat, are actually big men who pick their toes; on the other hand, in pay-to-win games such as SLG and MMO, there is a long-standing "dog-shill" phenomenon in order to stimulate big R consumption.

Surprisingly,Many of these idiots and hired guns that everyone hates are no longer real people, but "AI".

The participants here alsoThere are many top Internet companies such as Onlyfans and NetEase...An industry practitioner joked to Xiaoyu: "They are all shills, but now that they have been replaced by AI, they can move from the 315 Gala to the Internet Conference."

On Onlyfans, AI chat earns over 10,000 yuan a month

A little-known fact about the just-concluded Paris Olympics is that most athletes still had to pay for their own participation. A representative of an international athlete organization even said that many athletes "can barely pay their rent."

As a result, we found that more and more athletes found fans from an alternative fundraising platform - OnlyFans to fulfill their Olympic gold medal dreams.

This includes British diver Jack Laugher, who won the bronze medal in the men's synchronized 3-meter springboard at the Paris Olympics.His OnlyFans account, which costs $10 a month to subscribe, features him wearing "swim trunks, briefs, boxers, etc. that are safe to view in the workplace."

Matthew Mitcham, a diver from Australia, also started uploading topless photos and other images on OnlyFans.The income earned from this is three times what you would earn as a top athlete.

Mention the word “OnlyFans” to those in the know and they’ll inevitably smile “you know what I mean.” Sure, it has creators from other genres like fitness, music, and cooking, but the platform is known for its tolerance of adult content. Subscribers pay a monthly fee to access exclusive content from their favorite creators, and they can also earn money through tips and pay-per-view posts.

OnlyFans offers a private messaging feature that allows creators to chat with users who have paid to subscribe.One-on-one conversations and personalized content are important revenue-generating tools for creators, which can be used to build closer relationships with fans and increase fan loyalty and revenue.

OnlyFans has long used real people replying to messages as one of its biggest selling points. For many OnlyFans creators, chatting with fans and building rapport to promote "exclusive" content accounts for more than 50% of their income.

AI Drawing by Entertainment Capital

However,There are now some MCN agencies that manage real-life celebrities. They use AI to pretend to be these "celebrity" and chat with users.These third-party services enable creators to manage large numbers of subscribers without having to be personally involved in every interaction.

The US-based NEO Agency website has designed an AI chatbot in the hopes of bypassing or minimizing the need for human chat.

The chatbot, called FlirtFlow, “captures years of expertise in building human-machine relationships, ensuring every interaction is authentic and meaningful,” the company said.“It not only sends a message, it creates a real connection.”

The company said that there are currently more than 1,500 active creators, and the average monthly income generated by this is about $50,000. Luc Jaris, CEO of NEO Agency, said that they themselves manage about 70 OnlyFans porn creators as MCNs, and perhaps half of them use FlirtFlow, as do the other 20 or so agencies and dozens of individual creators.

Public pricing is also available on the website -If it is for personal use, you can use 20-25% of your future income as commission for this product.

However, fans certainly expect real interaction when they pay, and if the use of AI is not transparently disclosed, it may be seen as deception.

Also using AI is Botly, an Australian company founded in 2023. It charges creators $15 per month to analyze subscribers’ questions and chats to generate responses in the OnlyFans message box. Botly says the technology is used in more than 100,000 chats per month. Because humans still have to manually send AI-generated messages, the software circumvents OnlyFans’ bot ban.

OnlyFans’ terms of service explicitly prohibit its creators from using AI chatbots.But the app doesn’t disclose it to OnlyFans subscribers, and there’s no particularly good way to detect it, so users can only assume they’re chatting with celebrities in real time.

Seeing this, many people remembered the incident of "a male operator pretending to be a female anchor and calling a fan her husband" that was exposed by the 315 Gala.

Will these AI chat services also enter the field of live shows? Entertainment Capital asked an insider, who speculated that there would not be many such services in the Chinese circle.

"OnlyFans' European and American users mainly adopt a monthly subscription model. Their core business is to buy picture packages and videos, and chatting is just a value-added service. The emergence of AI will not reduce their payment rate."

butDomestic live shows are different. Adding friends is usually just the first step. Giving gifts, sending gifts privately, and deceiving them to pay for the meeting are the core."They won't stop until they've taken advantage of you. In this case, it's risky to use AI to answer all your questions. Sometimes, he asks you if you love him or if you can meet him. If the AI ​​is more 'generous' and agrees easily, he won't be willing to spend more money."

AI simulates players to conquer the SLG world

In addition to one-on-one chats, many Internet companies have discovered that AI can also be used to meet user needs in pay-to-win online games.

Of course, this stems from the "dog-backing" phenomenon that has long existed in the online gaming field.

Among many web games and mobile games, especially the two major categories of SLG and MMO, there is a common point that they rely on only a very small number of RMB players to maintain their operations.In order to maintain a good relationship with the "big spenders", operators generally need to operate carefully, using methods that are invisible to them, such as hiring real players or adjusting game parameters to provide companionship services; or in servers with a large number of people, they can create opposing camps or guild brothers to satisfy them with the pleasure of "commanding the world" and kill all the enemies.

Traditionally, a companion play service may include two roles:One plays the role of the boss in the game, while the other plays the role of a "little brother" who admires the player.

Previously, someone posted anonymously on Zhihu and recalled that his game company once received a complaint from a big boss, who said that he had invested a lot of money but could not open a treasure chest, and threatened to quit the service if he could not open it again. In order not to destroy the fairness of the game, the company had to arrange employees to enter his battlefield overnight and throw treasures to him at the moment he was about to lose the game. As a result, he saw it but did not pick it up. This kept him in the game.

A former gamer recalled to Hetun that his daily task was to use the game coins issued directly by the company to continuously improve his combat power, impact the rankings, and create pressure on the big Rs (big players who spend money) in the server; he would even "hunt down" the big Rs, but he had to be careful. After the player recharged and became stronger, the game agent would show a little weakness to satisfy the player's sense of accomplishment, and the cycle would repeat. After all, becoming stronger in the game only requires changing a string of code.

With the development of AI technology, the above-mentioned "proxy playing" behaviors have gradually shifted from manual operation to automatic completion by AI.

At this year's ChinaJoy, Entertainment Capital saw the SLG intelligent body promotional display board of NetEase Digital Intelligence at the CJ booth, which was particularly eye-catching. Its purpose was also clearly written on the display board:

"Replace 80% of low-activity players, lock in and stimulate high-activity players."

It is said thatNetEase's SLG intelligent body can access PC games, mobile games and even WeChat mini-games, providing features such as "active social interaction and self-growth".

NetEase Vice President Pang Dazhi revealed that with the help of AI technology, players of the mobile game Ni Shui Han can "encounter" a group of intelligent NPCs who have no fixed scripts and can think independently at any time. He predicted that in the future, it will be a high probability event to encounter AI characters that are almost indistinguishable from real people in the game."The gaming industry has long been recognized as the best testing ground for AI technology, and is also the first outpost to perceive and adapt to the impact of AI."

Since last year, the relevant technologies of NetEase Games' "Fuxi Laboratory" have been adopted by dozens of its games. On the official website of NetEase Digital Intelligence, we can also see that it covers a large number of game types.

For example, in some MOBA games, the peak number of matches per day exceeds 10 million.Through deep learning and reinforcement learning, AI maintains a delicate balance in the game: making it difficult for players while also making them feel enjoyable.

AI can generate decision paths similar to those of human players, thereby playing games on behalf of real playersThis AI can help keep the game active even when there aren't enough real players.

In other cases, AI will analyze the player's operations and decisions, and automatically adjust the enemy's strategy and strength so that the game difficulty always matches the player's level to maintain the player's interest.

In 2022, players of the popular strategy board game Diplomacy gathered at theMetaverse” to participate in online tournaments for the game. They are located all over the world. None of the players can see each other and can only interact in the game.

So none of them knew that one of the players was a computer — an AI program called CICERO, built by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and more.

Even before the advent of the Grand Model, Cicero’s triumph in the Diplomacy represented a huge leap forward—In multiplayer online games, AI can intelligently manage large amounts of resources, and even form temporary alliances with other participants, and then "rebel" at the most appropriate time, forming an alliance with another group of people and "counter-killing" the original allies.

Computers have been beating humans at strategy games like chess and Go for decades. But Cicero is very different. It’s not a form of “White moves 3 steps down” intelligence. It’s a move that “passes theTuring Test"After that, everything will be different.

For example,After "Against the Water" announced the use of AI NPC last year, it rushed blindly on the road of promoting itself as an AI game.Their official account wrote:

“The highly acclaimed AI combat assistant can help you solve problems during your dungeon journey; AI text face shaping can create a stunning appearance by typing; AI motion capture in the crew mode allows you to do whatever you want in the game; highly intelligent NPCs have completely become a part of this arena.”

Why AI?

Seeing that AI is secretly used in so many scenes, everyone can't help but wonder why various forms of entertainment are scrambling to use AI?

Let us wipe away our tears and calmly look at what OnlyFans authors and game developers were doing before the emergence of AI.

For many OnlyFans creators, chatting and building rapport with fans to promote “exclusive” content accounts for more than 50% of their revenue.

And you can’t stop doing this. The more frequently you reply, the more addicted your fans will be, and the more money you will make.

But it is obvious that if this idol were to face tens of thousands of fans in person, it would be impossible for him/her to know the detailed situation of each and every fan.

So it's like replying to fan mail. Excellent idols also have managers and studios, and of course they need a team to help write these reply messages.

Sometimes, one or two people are not enough. They have to hire a large number of outsourced workers. In fact, a large proportion of these outsourced workers are low-wage workers from developing countries, especially the Philippines, Nigeria, India and Pakistan.

They reportedly work six days a week in shifts up to 12 hours long for about $3 an hour.

(Now you know why the introduction says "Say goodbye to the absentee chat"...)

But even if all outsourcing is done to cheaper foreign labor, the cost is still a high expense. Especially in the domestic live broadcast industry, operators need to be good at speaking and have many tricks, and the monthly income is over 10,000 yuan...

At this time, the advantages of the large model are revealed.

Let’s take a look at the gaming side. We actually know that there were a large number of shills in previous MMOs and SLGs. There’s nothing much to say about this.

Some of the job vacancies posted on recruitment websites of gaming companies are, to put it bluntly, recruiting game agents. It has been reported that the vast majority of game agents are hired by the gaming companies themselves, and some companies have even reached the point where "all employees except a small number of R&D personnel are agents".

In fact, if you don’t want to deceive fans or players into mistaking AI for a real person, there are virtual companion products online that state that they are AI, and the price is much lower than using real people directly.

LushAI claims to be the world's first AI-driven fan economy agency, aiming to compete with OnlyFans.This website consists of the default service object Jenny and other AI models.Jenny looks like this:

Jenny provides essentially the same service as the human content creators that make up OnlyFans, except that she is algorithm-driven and can respond 24/7. Their service is also affordable—as a “cousin,” Jenny’s content costs the equivalent of $10 per month, and fans can access “photos, videos, and private chats.”

LushAI also offers Kupidly, an “exclusive social messaging platform” where users can connect and chat with Jenny and other AI models. LushAI’s faces were created using Stable Diffusion, and the chat capabilities are provided by the open source model enqAI.

The platform has also attracted some real people to join the camp. Demi Zhang, an American college student, model and content creator, shared her portrait with LushAI to create a unique character for her social media accounts. She has accumulated 21,800 followers on Instagram.

However,The reason why some people still go to OnlyFans to fish in troubled waters when there are pure AI platforms is purely because if Zhiqiu claims to be AI, it may not make so much money.

A survey shows that if a product or service emphasizes its AI attributes in its promotional slogan, it will arouse consumers’ disgust. Moreover, if a product is labeled as being made by AI, it will be considered to have lower human labor content, so the psychological price should also be lower than that made by real people.

LushAI founder Eunn said he did not see a fundamental difference between AI companions and real women selling “digital sex” on OnlyFans, Instagram or TikTok.

“When you see a so-called ‘real person’ online or on Instagram, you’re not actually looking at a real person, you’re interacting with a digital representation of a real person.”

Many content creators and consumers find it difficult to agree with this.

I don't know whether it's good or bad.The future direction of AI evolution is to make it invisible to you while doing better than actual humans.

So, don’t ask who that person is, just enjoy the battles in the game or the care and concern from the internet celebrity.