Adult film star Riley Reid launches Clona.AI, a sexting chatbot platform – Engadget
Adult film icon and media investor Riley Reid aims to bring the transformational capabilities of generative AI to adult entertainment with an online platform where users can chat with digital versions of content creators. But unlike other, scuzzier adult chatbots, Clona.AI’s avatars are trained with explicit consent of the models’ creators who have direct input in what the “AI companions” will, and won’t, talk about.
For $30 a month, fans and subscribers will be able to hold “intimate conversations” with digital versions of their favorite adult stars, content creators and influencers. The site’s roster currently includes Reid herself and Lena the Plug. A free tier is also available but offers just five chat messages per month.
“The reality is, AI is coming, and if it's not Clona, it’s somebody else,” Reid told 404 Media. “When [other people] use deepfakes or whatever — if I'm not partnering up with it, then someone else is going to steal my likeness and do it without me. So being presented with this opportunity, I was so excited because I felt like I had a chance to be a part of society's technological advances.”
Clona uses Meta’s Llama 2 large language model as a base, then heavily refines and retrains it to reflect the personality of the person it’s based on. Reid explains that her model was first trained on a variety of her online media including interviews, podcast appearances and YouTube videos (in addition to some of her x-rated work) before further fine tuning its response by having the AI chat with Reid herself.
“I’ll be able to see how it responds to users, and edit it to be like ‘no, I would have said it more like this,’’’ Reid said. “But in the beginning my focus was on things like making sure it had my dogs’ names right, making sure I was fact-checking it.”
While the AI companion will be capable talking dirty, how dirty that gets depends on the actor’s preferences, not the user’s. Reid notes that her model, for example, will not discuss physically dangerous sex acts with users. "I don't know if the tech team thought about the sounding guys, but I was like, I thought about them,” she said.
Generative AI technology has shown tremendous potential in creating digital clones of deceased celebrities and recording artists. The process requires little more than the celeb’s permission (or that of their estate) and a sufficiently large corpus of their vocal or video recordings. However, we’ve already also seen that technology be misused in deepfake pornography and shady dental advertising. Unscrupulous data scraping practices on the public web (data which is then used to train LLMs) has also raised difficult questions regarding modern copyright laws, copyright infringement and Grammy award eligibility.
Still, Reid remains optimistic about the historically proven resilience of the sex industry. “I feel like we're gonna be a huge part of AI adapting into our society, because porn is always like that,” Reid said. “It’s what it did with the internet. And the porn world has seen so many advances in technology.”
The Erae II takes the customizable MPE playing surface of the original and adds a more robust interface and tons of connectivity options.
The fan-made racing game Bloodborne Kart was set to be released on January 31, but Lilith Walther, the developer behind the project, says the team will have to make some changes after hearing from Sony. It'll lose the Bloodborne branding, among other things.
Casio showed up to NAMM 2024 with the Dimension Tripper: an experimental Bluetooth expression controller that you operate with your guitar strap.
Fossil Group confirmed to The Verge on Friday that it's exiting the smartwatch business, and will instead focus on its other products. It hasn't released a new smartwatch since 2021. The company said it'll keep releasing software updates for the time being.
With a healthy dose of heart and whimsy, the Sundance documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon follows two young Black women who are devoted to finding the original model for Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.
This week: 🍎🚘. 🚘🤑 and 🍎📲.
A lawsuit accuses 23andMe of failing to notify customers that they were specifically targeted for having Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.
ElevenLabs, an AI startup that offers voice cloning services with its tools, has banned the user that created an audio deepfake of Joe Biden used in an attempt to disrupt the elections, according to Bloomberg.
Instagram is testing yet another feature meant to give users an alternative to finstas, called "flipside."
Tensions have been high in the Cities: Skylines community since the launch of the sequel in October.
Apple has laid down the rules for opening a competing app store. It's not pleased too many of its rivals.
A planned live-action TV series based on Final Fantasy 14 is no longer happening. "The size and scale needed to do it right proved too much for anyone to want to risk," one of the creatives involved said.
Microsoft is the latest company to announce a major round of layoffs in its gaming division. It's cutting around 1,900 workers from its Xbox, Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax (aka Bethesda) teams.
The Samsung Galaxy S24 isn’t taking Google’s Gemini AI to China. The Chinese version of the flagship phone reportedly uses Baidu’s Ernie chatbot to power the phone’s AI-powered features.
An aerial adventure title called Ultrawings 2 has hit PlayStation VR2 earlier than just about anyone expected, including the game's developers.
The MicroKorg 2 is still in the prototype stage, but it already feels like a polished and worthy sequel to one of the most popular synthesizers ever.
This week brings us deals on Anker accessories, Amazon's Echo Show 8 and a smoker we checked out at CES.
George Carlin’s estate has filed a lawsuit against the makers of an hour-long comedy special featuring a version of the comedian made with artificial intelligence. The estate says the video-makers stole "a great American artist’s work."
Here's a list of the best smartphones you can buy right now, as chosen by Engadget editors.
Swedish car maker Polestar is the latest EV company to slash its workforce.
Subscribe to our two newsletters:
– A weekly roundup of our favorite tech deals
– A daily dose of the news you need
Please enter a valid email address
Please select a newsletter
By subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy.
