Something I've been thinking about lately as I try to resist using chatbots again (instant hit of dopamine their responses are) is the fact that there are some creative people making series of interconnected bots on these sites, loads of characters, multiple intros spanning whole stories. These are the bots I most want to chat with when it's difficult to stick with my quitting.
I know for a lot of people 'this started as a bot on an AI chatbot site' might be a dealbreaker but I feel that if these creators used ideas they originally came up with for chatbots to make something AI free that would be worth supporting. And it might encourage them to make less chatbots if they got a positive response on something else. And yeah maybe that would require art depending on the thing being made but you could hire real artists.
Since a lot of chatbots on these kinds of sites are romance centered, most of the stories these creators write are focused on users forming relationships with their characters. A large cast of characters, a focus on the user romancing them... I've seen chatbots where the creator tries to prompt the bot to keep track of variables.
The point is, I think a lot of these series of chatbots would be extremely well suited to being adapted into dating sims. And not just because I love dating sims. There's some huge, detailed, intricate worlds with compelling characters and dynamics between characters, too much for an LLM to keep track of in my opinion.
I would be delighted if those creators gave me the opportunity to experience what they've made in a piece of media that doesn't use generative AI. I would pay for some of them.
If you're somehow a chatbot creator reading this: Hi - please consider making a dating sim: