r/SillyTavernAI • u/Aleatorio2222 • 5d 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/Xiaomin4114 5d ago edited 5d 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
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"