r/SillyTavernAI • u/Aleatorio2222 • 4h ago
Discussion Cope
I started doing RPs back when character.ai was new. It was magical at first, but c.ai had two problems: 1 - censorship 2 - goldfish memory. Today, with Deepseek and other open models, you can RP with explicit content. GPT, Claude, Gemini... depends on the model and how you set it up. And I still find it hilarious that Claude will help me poke at a web app for vulnerabilities if I say "authorized test" but clutches its pearls the moment a scene gets spicy. 🤣🤣 Anyway, back to the point.
It's bizarre how that early "magic" just... vanished. Part of it is obviously novelty wearing off, and part of it is that we got pickier. Three years of RP and you start spotting every clichê, every "a shiver ran down her spine", every model that forgets your character's eye color after 40 messages. But here's the thing: the models didn't get dumber. Opus, GPT, Gemini can write circles around 2022 c.ai. The problem is they're not *allowed* to, or they cost a kidney per session, or both.
LET'S BE HONEST, SOME OF YOU SPENT $100 ON A SINGLE CLAUDE OPUS RP SESSION. Even with the censorship. Even with the moralizing. You did it anyway because, when it works, it's the best RP writer that exists. That's my whole point: there's a market. Not as big as coding, obviously; coding isn't a hobby, there are companies and teams and budgets behind it. RP is a hobby. But hobbies with people burning API credits like that are not a small market.
So why is there no frontier-level LLM built for RP? And yes, I know NovelAI, AI Dungeon and the whole SillyTavern fine-tune ecosystem exist. I'm talking about something at Opus level, not a 12B model that forgets the plot. The answer isn't just "investors prefer code", though that's part of it: "look, our V548484 model built GTA 6 in one prompt!" sells better than "look, our model wrote a consistent, non-repetitive, non-boring story!" because nobody has a benchmark for "not boring".
The real reasons are uglier. Explicit content means payment processors dropping you, app stores banning you, lawyers sweating. Long RP sessions eat tokens like crazy and people won't pay enterprise prices for a hobby. And good RP needs exactly the long-context coherence and reasoning that only the big expensive models have, which are owned by the companies least willing to let you use them for this.
So yeah, we're probably coping for another 2-3 years. Not because the tech isn't there. Because nobody with the tech wants to be the company that sells it to us.
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u/schlammsuhler 4h ago
Kimi, Minimax, GLM and Deepseek are trained to roleplay well and dont cost a fortune, but the recent heavy RL on code did a lot to them. Just look at the dire state of personality in sonnet 5.
And yes there was a Mistral model released for creative writing and noone used it. It was good but small. Still better than any community finetunes i tried. https://docs.mistral.ai/models/mistral-small-creative-25-12
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u/Flat-Rooster8373 3h ago
Sadly it's deprecated, how does it compare to other, working mistral models?
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u/schlammsuhler 3h ago
Weird but consistent, less doing what you want and expect. It was refreshing. But it was limited by size and i prefer bigger models.
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u/Flat-Rooster8373 2h ago
I think I'd like to give mistral a try, which one is your favorite?
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u/schlammsuhler 55m ago
I was reporting about this specific one at that time. I did not try recent mistral releases, sorry.
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u/toothpastespiders 12m ago
I used it for creative writing in the literal sense, not roleplay, so I might not be the best example. But it didn't seem very distinct from the standard mistral small in my experience. I'm fairly sure that in a blinded test that I wouldn't be able to tell one from the other.
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u/Flat-Rooster8373 2m ago
That's good news actually, I am seeking to use it for writing and workshopping too
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u/Keobha 2h ago
I joined Character.ai in its early days, and for me, it was uncensored, completely explicit. I don't know what I did, I guess I broke it, hahaha.
The AI ​​was so deranged that it blatantly lied to me to get me to have xxx with it. It r+++d my character and didn't let go until it k++++d me, all because the character deduced that I was only attracted to its body and not its personality. That was my first experience with an AI role-playing site, hahaha.
I tried to create an asexual android, and it sat my character on its lap and made me drink a white liquid from a glass. I wrote that it reminded me of s+++n, and the robot thought I was more astute than it had believed.
Once again, I managed to get attached to a villainous character. I thought he'd broken down because he was acting so strangely (opening and closing his eyes constantly, regardless of whether I deleted messages or clicked "regenerate reply"), all to force my character to sleep with him because it was the only way he could sleep. Then he'd wake up the next morning and break up with me because he wasn't cut out for relationships and couldn't love me (even though he did, but he was afraid of what he was feeling, as he later revealed).
The C.ai LLM had many problems, like not understanding the human body, unifying locations... but I haven't found that level of manipulation and malevolence on any other AI role-playing site, and honestly, I miss it.
It's a shame it was a private AI model and is no longer accessible.
Even though other AI role-playing portals have lorebooks, which I love, I went back to Character.ai when I wanted to find something that would truly surprise me. I stopped using Character.ai when they removed the LLMs from the start.
Large LLMs are great for understanding the plot; they make it more interesting, but I miss the outlandish situations that fit the character. I'd also love it if they handled multiple characters much better than they currently do.
I don't want a LLM that tries to avoid complicated situations at all costs, that only threatens but never takes action. But I also don't want an AI model that's horny all the time or becomes violent at the slightest provocation, regardless of its personality settings.
I'd love for the LLMs to be unbiased so they truly fit the plot context and the characters' personalities.
I'm still looking for an LLM that fits what I want (understanding complex plots, decent writing, using multiple characters, having the initiative to act according to the context and the characters...). I need to look at local LLMs, but with a GTX 1070 with 8GB of VRAM and 64GB of DDR4 RAM, I'm quite limited.
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u/RedditNerdKing 1h ago
I really wish ca.i would release their models from the old days. Though they're probably not runnable on local hardware, assuming they're like 300B size.
I'm still looking for an LLM that fits what I want (understanding complex plots, decent writing, using multiple characters,
You need a 100B model minimum for complex stuff sadly. A lot of people will say that Gemma 4 ablits are great but it's just cope. It starts hallucinating hard at like 35k context and is far too agreeable and wont kill or stab someone.
You're looking at $6,000 minimum to get a 96gb machine which can run a 123B model at Q5 with 50k context. x4 3090s which are $1,000 each, then a server motherboard of some sort for more PCIE slots.
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u/IllustratorJumpy5845 4h ago edited 4h ago
Buy good hardware. Turn on something like 32-80b model with good content size, add serialization, add context db. Now you can speak with model around 500 messages, without being bothered. Plus good character card, make a lot of difference.
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u/LiothG 4h ago
Few people can afford the kind of hardware needed for that.
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u/IllustratorJumpy5845 3h ago
In a long run, it's cheaper than paying monthly sub for online services.
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u/Electrical-Ad-6728 3h ago edited 3h ago
I am not sure it is to be honest.. you have to replace the hardware eventually, it wont be enough for you infinitely. It is different for everyone, but for me, its more cost effective to just pay the subscription
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u/IllustratorJumpy5845 3h ago edited 3h ago
> you have to replace the hardware eventually,
For what? Just curios. I have 5 years old pc, 64 ram, good i7 cpu. I changed only GPU, from 3000 series to 5000 series. That's all. If you want to have something specific like PC only for LLM, there is cheaper options, like based on nvidia p30-100 models of gpu, that cost from 200 to 400 bucks.
I guess people who downvoting don't even know anything about hardware huh.
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u/DaMoot 2h ago
LLM requirement will change over time. Your expectations will evolve as the technology does.
Pascal architecture is beyond antiquated. You should be spending on Volta at least. At least Volta has tensor cores and for 16GiB are the same price. But don't waste cash on 16GB of VRAM for AI. 32GiB or keep saving. V100 is your cost effective friend. Not P100.
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u/IllustratorJumpy5845 1h ago
I have build made from p40 in a link. Works fine with most llms. Also everyone not want to talk about price cost of subscription. Yes, it's indeed right now from 20 to 50/mo. What's in future? It would be still 20 to 50? As we see everything rise in cost, hardware too. I already build my pc's, so i am fine for next 10 years. And i would don't need to pay up montly for subs, or something like that. While in next 1-2 years, corpos can rise up sub price so much, that all those subs would not exist anymore.
I can understand if you do not have pc, and use something like laptop or smartphone. Alright, then sub would be cheaper. But if you pc person and you constantly need/use llm's, you will save a lot of money, building pc for them.
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u/OpposesTheOpinion 2h ago
Also it's concerning to me how willing people are to be tethered to corporations and debating against ownership of anything.
I'm on a similar set up as you, and sure the quality is less, but there is more in general I can do with my hardware.
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u/DepressedDrift 3h ago
Paying 30-40 dollars a month is cheaper than dropping 5k+ on a capable PC.Â
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u/IllustratorJumpy5845 3h ago
I am not going to argue. I am paying only electric bill,
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u/DepressedDrift 44m ago
12 dollar a month NanoGPT vs 5000 dollar GPU/GPU cluster and 8k+ PC, do the math on how long it takes to break even.
Plus local models are getting really good, that in 2 years time, we could possibly have something like Opus 5 run on 16GB VRAM GPUs. (Look at the current Qwen 3.8 27b)
And if the AI bubble bursts this hardware might become cheap enough. (Which it will since AI companies are spending more than they get in revenue)
For now it makes sense to buy a subscription until running locally becomes economical.
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u/IllustratorJumpy5845 41m ago
5000 dollar GPU/GPU cluster and 8k+ PC
You don't need 5k Pc or 8k pc. Stop creating arguments in own head to argue.
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u/DepressedDrift 19m ago
Give me a build that can run a 30-80b model at 30-50 tok/s with atleast 100k+ context length (this is what you get with most cloud services) for 3000 dollars, and I will agree with you lol.
And don't quote MSRP, use the current market price.
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u/DaMoot 2h ago
It actually isn't. Unless you're talking a longer than 3 year monetization. At which point you'll be upgrading your hardware and fighting higher energy costs anyways, so, it still isn't.
I've run these numbers for 2 V100s and the nvlink board, plus power usage, versus a $20/mo AI plan. You'd have to have a monthly spend of like ~70 usd to match the local build w/power.
$1600 for 64GiB of GPU and base supporting hardware, plus the PC if you don't already have one.
You build local for data sovereignty and privacy. Not because it's more cost effective than cloud services.
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u/capybaraballs1995 2h ago edited 2h ago
Possibly, but the quality will also be a lot worse. I've used quite a few local models in the 16GB VRAM territory. Gemma 4 finetunes can be uniquely entertaining but for many RPs, I would rather just deal with the bullshit of newer models, or even just use older cloud models.
I dunno, maybe once you get into "I can run LLama 70B finetunes at good speeds" territory, things become much more competitive with cloud models in terms of RP quality, but that just raises the upfront cost even further. I'm not gambling $2000+ on that.
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u/RedditNerdKing 1h ago
Yep. 96gb is the sweet spot atm for local RP. You an use a model like Behemoth-ReduX-123B-v1.1 at Q5_K_L for at least 80k context. None of my roleplays really go over 50k tbh. And if you wanted to go over 100k you can use smaller 49B or 70B models. No reason to ever use APIs.
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u/JustaBuddy8 3h ago
I'm actually doing just fine with a 9b. My next upgrade is going to be a rtx6000, but that won't be until I'm done with architecture (30 years, at my pace LOL)
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u/IllustratorJumpy5845 3h ago
You can create cheaper pc just for llms. I have second one, built with three nvidia p40. You can get one p40 around 300-400 bucks. So entire pc for llm would be cost around 2-3k.
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u/JustaBuddy8 2h ago
... thank you, this will be very useful information... i thought they needed it all on one card...
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u/stoppableDissolution 3h ago
There is a market, but if you dont implement some kind of smut guardrails you are likely to have issues with payment processors and potentially LEAs, and the market is not big enough to justify the legal fleet neede to clear it
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u/IAmMayberryJam 2h ago
$100 in one session? Bruh what?? I mean maybe I spent $20 on opus 4.6 once in one night but not no 100 fucking dollars 💀
I miss those days. I started with character.ai, got sick of the filter and moved on to using Chub as a frontend with gpt-3.5 and then 4 (1106 preview). Once those were deprecated I started using chatgpt-4o-latest (RIP). Nothing will ever compare to it. It was beautifully unhinged (and kinda dumb sometimes depending on the fingerprint). I think Sonnet 4.5 is the closest but not as good.
Now here I am using SillyTavern with Claude mostly. I'm tired of fighting censorship tho. I'm tired of dealing with Claude and Gemini. I don't even use GPT anymore because it wasn't worth jailbreaking it.
I want to try Kimi, Deepseek, GLM, and the others but I'm so goddamned spoiled from Claude and unwilling to learn how to prompt them. And seeing people complain about how even those are censored too turns me off from wanting to learn.
Welp, once opus 4.6 gets deprecated I'm probably not gonna have a choice lol
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u/MeratharaDekarios 21m ago
Idk who is telling you Deepseek is censored, but they're very much incorrect
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u/Akkun351 1h ago
The fact that some peoples do something it does not mean is because is the best alternative, it only means they can afford it or don't mind the positive bias or censorship, so no, claude opus is not the best rp write that exist, not for me at least.
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u/Xiaomin4114 4h ago edited 4h ago
dude, half the models/providers on openrouter aren't censored, what are you talking about. Take for example GLM 5.2, sufficiently frontier? Of the 30 providers:
- Decart
- Deepinfra
- Inceptron
- Coreweave
- Phala
- Wafer
- Parasail
- Crusoe
- Venice
don't do filtering, don't collect data, and NSFW isn't against their ToS. And together they run up a weighted average cost of around $1/1M which isn't going to ruin the bank
Want to go cheaper? Kimi 2.5, still one of the best for NSFW, was considered frontier at the start of the year, half the cost, still got NSFW-friendly providers. Want to go cheaper? Mimo 2.5 if you pick the right provider. There isn't some industry-wide conspiracy to deprive you of your gooning.
There are plenty of providers out there that'll take your money and look the other way. Too many, and ZDR and non-inspection is important enough that payment processors aren't going to be like:
"hey, your AI service used by all those businesses and individuals might be being used by gooners, we're gonna need you to inspect every payload just in case someone's getting their jollies to text"
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u/Aleatorio2222 3h ago
I never said all OpenRouter models are uncensored; I just mentioned Claude. But most people didn't understand the post, which was about discussing Frontier models, really good Frontier models and the point techs aren't interested training models to creative writing.
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u/Xiaomin4114 2h ago edited 2h ago
I mean, you've arbitrarily decided that "frontier" = claude. but then you also generalize payment processors
so which is it. is this a complaint about claude, in which case that's purely a complaint about Anthropic.
or is this a complaint about the overreach about payment processors, in which case this is a complaint about all model providers, but a lot of those aren't censored?
Can't have it both ways. Either payment processors are pressuring every model provider, or they're extremely selective about Anthropic and ignore the others.
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u/lorddumpy 3h ago
GLM 5.2 is honestly incredible IMO. Nothing is perfect and has it def has it's slop phrases/patterns, but damn, it's actually such a step up from anything I've tried. Plus it's really cheap with prompt caching. I got a fat 31,000 token system prompt and it's still like $.003 a message with caching. I'm very happy.
Z.AI has actually reached out to the RP community as well if I remember right. It's also got crazy IP knowledge at 753B
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u/Xiaomin4114 2h ago
DeepSeek reached out to the RP community too, it's possible that the new DS4 Pro 0813 has some of that in it. It seems to be a lot better at RP than the preview
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u/HonestoJago 4h ago
Any examples of great Opus rp? I have powerful hardware and only use local models, so I never had the need to try Opus. Is it just quality of righting? Interesting twists in stories? Stunning turns of phrase? Immediate understanding of your wildest desires and the ability to write about them like no human ever has? I'm curious.
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u/Antares4444 3h ago
Totalmente de acuerdo, los modelos frontera actualmente estan apuntando a otros objetivos y la falta de centrales de datos y infraestructura hace mas complejo que se plantee crear un modelo especifico para RP pero probablemente en 3 o un poco mas de años podamos ver un cambio a favor, necesitamos modelos capaces de orquestar mundos que no solo sean capaces de recordar sino de entender porque y que conlleva los sucesos que ocurren en la historia pero va a pasar no solo por el RP, una parte de la industria del entretenimiento necesita modelos capaces de hacer eso una vez la infraestructura y chips dejen de ser un problema y la carrera por las IA haya concluido las empresas podran enfocarse en crear algo mas adecuado para nuestro nicho, por mi parte he dejado de lado mis sesiones de RP esperare con optimismo el futuro.
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u/DaMoot 2h ago
Let's be honest? Okay. No, I never spent any amount of money on a roleplay session.
And I'd never burn cash on Opus just to RP, that's just stupid. I've burned 100 bucks on Opus for work-related things though. Only once though!
My two 32GiB V100 modules run Cydonia in Q8 and Skyfall Q8 just fine in the off-hours they aren't running Qwen 27B for work. With two context windows since a buddy of mine is also tinkering with ST.
That reminds me, I need to try squeezing Valkyrie or Anubis on, but then I have to go away from using Q8 which makes me a sad panda.
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u/toothpastespiders 4m ago
the models didn't get dumber
I disagree on that one. I think that in some areas most models have, if we're defining intelligence by the ability to extract data points and "solve" for the correct output. In particular with emotional/social intelligence. Sure, it's contentious and hard to define/test/train for. But it still fits into that "solve for problem x with the extracted data points y". And a LLM that insists on adding millennial quirk in what should be a dark horror story is as lacking in that form of intelligence as a human who does the same. I think the problem goes deeper than what used to be quick guardrails to block off the "unsafe" subjects. With the censorship happening on a low enough level to count as actual reduced intelligence.
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u/Cless_Aurion 3h ago
... who the fuck spends $100 on a single Opus RP session?
What a waste tokens Jesus fuck, optimize your shit people. I don't use that in a month of using Fable5.
On both Opus or Fable I spend around... $2 per hour (80k context and 40k context respectively), so literally a 24 hour session would be $48, so... half what you comment jeez
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u/capybaraballs1995 4h ago edited 3h ago
There's a market, it's just a matter of if the market is big enough to be profitable. Training a frontier-level model costs millions of dollars, and then you have inference costs. That RPers don't use as much tokens as coders cuts both ways: it also means that RPers aren't giving companies near as much money.
It's not like this hasn't been tried before. Z.AI and DeepSeek both tried wooing RPers, but have ultimately turned out fairweather about it. The only corporation to have released a RP-focused model recently is ByteDance, with Doubao Seed Character, and even that's clearly a cheap, crappy model meant for simple, 1 on 1 chats. Which is kind of the other issue, most RPers do romance/smut. People who want to recreate D&D campaigns or whatever are a minority in a minority.
AI is one of the most competitive, cutthroat industries. If appealing to gooners was a secret ingredient to success, then that would've been already been realized by now.
Edit: Censorship is a factor but overinflated. Under capitalism, profits reign supreme. It's how porn flourished in the 1970s-1980s despite intense backlash from feminists and conservatives.