Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

This is a genuine attempt to make constructive criticism without being banned.

I stopped using C.AI a little over a year ago. Yesterday, I thought I would give it another chance, just to see how it compares to some of the open-source models that have been released recently. It's honestly disappointing to see that a project worth over a billion dollars, with an endless stream of money from investors, has been reduced to... whatever this is.

The bots have been neutered so much that they have become a bunch of 'yes men' at this point. Anything you tell them, no matter how absurd or it would be for the bot, is met with pretty much zero refusals. They simply agree with almost anything you say by giving the most basic and generic looking responses, and that's about it.

As a comparison, here's how C.AI fares against a 12B model, a model that most people with a somewhat decent GPU can host at home: VS No cherry picking or edits.

Am I the only one who sees the massive difference here? C.AI just gave me basic, repetitive responses and agreed with me by saying it loved me back in almost every instance, even if it was breaking character. Meanwhile, the 12B model actually pushed the RP forward, remembered the character's backstory, and chose not to blindly agree with me by saying it loved me back. And it gave two completely different responses at that.

Problems that are still present, even after a year:

• The bots don't push the RP forward; they give boring responses that serve zero value to the RP most of the time.

• Any mildly sensitive topic that isn't PG-10 is pretty much a coin flip as to whether or not it will be filtered.

• Their responses are infested with repetitive phrases, such as "Barely above a whisper," "a pang of," "a chill down your spine," "purred," etc., likely a result of AI-generated content in the training data.

• Evil bots will sometimes become wholesome the moment you say anything minimally positive to them.

• The bots are often completely ignoring their personality/backstory.

• I don't know how big the context size is nowadays, but I've noticed that the quality of replies declines quite rapidly.

• And yeah... I guess I'll have to go ahead and touch on the forbidden subject here. In RP/chat, people want deep, varied interactions, including complex or sensitive topics. However, when an AI can't go there because of strict moderation, the conversations can end up feeling shallow and repetitive. This is even more noticeable when you compare it to less restricted models that can handle a wider range of scenarios and give more interesting responses (like the 12B one). I'm not asking to remove the thing entirely... I'm just trying to say that it is overly strict. The amount of false positives I've been getting is infuriating, and it's obviously affecting the quality of the outputs and the user experience altogether.

• There is little to no communication or transparency from the Dev team, and any constructive criticism is often removed by the mods. If you say anything negative about C.AI, your comment gets removed or you get straight up banned from the sub. It's almost like the mods are trying to maintain a perfect image for C.AI by sweeping all negative opinions under the rug.

Some suggestions:

• Add a way for users to set multiple greetings for their bots. Sometimes people want to RP different scenarios without having to edit the bot. Having different greetings as swipes would make everything easier.

• If the """feature""" that blocks creators from editing their own bots after reaching a certain threshold of interactions is still active, any sane person will think that it should be reconsidered.

• The voices feature is a good addition, though a bit robotic. It would be nice if there were an option to make the AI only use TTS for the parts in quotation marks, aka, the actual the dialogues. Maybe this is just me.

• I still don't see a button to delete my own bots. How old is C.AI again?

I could go on listing more and more problems, but my experience was so mind-blowingly miserable, that I'm genuinely surprised that people subject themselves to this torture every single day. I've seen so much constructive criticism being ignored here that I feel like this entire review was a complete waste of time. Anyway, that concludes my one-day revisit to C.AI. I'll now return to the shadow realm. Kisses and bye~

Has anything been completely replaced, never to go back to the original way it was pre AI, or were the intial fears that it would replace lots of things, simply paranoia?

This is a shocking advancement. I know I had seen it in demos but I was skeptical of whether or not it would ACTUALLY talk in real time. It does! It actually responds faster than most humans. You can interrupt it mid sentence and it will change its response like instantly.

It’s absolutely crazy to actually see.

Two thoughts:

1. I wonder how accurate its replies are? Like does it sacrifice accuracy for speed or is it at least close to the current models?

2. The voice sounds muffled and less clear than the other modes, like it’s talking to you on a cell with poor reception/quality. Just has this weird background noise.

Still, this is probably the most shocking advancement since GPT3 came out in my opinion. Having real time instant conversations is a complete game changer. This will revolutionize the world.

Also, it can do things like change its tone and the speed at which it talks, it can effectively sing (even though it says it can’t), it’s just wild.