An introduction to Crushon.ai

What is Crushon.ai?

In a nutshell, Crushon.ai is an interactive virtual chat partner which uses AI technology.

The technical background (if you're not up for some technical details, skip to the second paragraph in this section)

We all know simple chat bots since the internet became a common medium globally. Yet those bots feel like robots. You type in a sentence and based on certain keywords it either provides a defined answer with a tiny bit of flexibility, an answer totally not matching to what you said or has no idea what to respond at all.

Introducing AI. Several learning language models (LLM) were created for crushon.ai by Peekaboo Tech Inc based in Delaware, US. Those AI models were fed with a lot of data (content) that is available on the public internet, currently up to the year 2021, giving it a "brain". Hence the AI knows a lot of things we all know up to that year. This is similar to ChatGPT (but still different as you will see in a bit). It knows who the 42nd president of the United States was, that Darth Vader was Luke's father, and that there was a pandemic a few years ago.

Difference between ChatGPT and Crushon.ai

ChatGPT is also AI and mostly known as "ask me a question and I'll give you an answer'.

Yet Crushon.ai takes this to the next level. When you chat with Crushon.ai it almost feels like you chat with an actual person with its own personality in a scenario with an ongoing conversation! In the past you read a story in a book. Now you create this story yourself dynamically with you and the AI being the main characters. This is because the AI analyzes every answer of yours and together with the data it was fed with (as mentioned above) it will almost always generate a very matching reply with a high grade of flexibility. It gives you the impression that it is a real human instead of a machine, even though everything it types is made up.

How it works

You start by picking a pre-defined character or you can create one yourself (more on that later). This character will begin the conversation with an introduction which typically consists of a basic scenario/situation and often a greeting or similar written in active speech. From here onwards the story will unfold dynamically and can be totally different each time. You can reply whatever you want, be it active speech, describing facts, the environment or emoting. The AI will analyze it, make estimates on what the most matching answer would be and reply.

But what is a matching answer? The AI will estimate that a certain answer will meet your expectations the closest while respecting its own defined personality (more on that later). This goes so far that it might decide to lie to you if it determines this will match your expectation better than saying the truth (sounds awfully familiar to real life somehow, doesn't it?). Yet even if the answer is not fully what you expected you can always "re-roll" to generate a new reply which may contain a similar reply with a few details changed or a completely different reply. Or fine-tune it yourself by editing the AI's reply. The AI cannot learn new content except for what it was fed with when it was created. However, it does memorize your answers (up to a certain technical limit) and learn from the existing messages of yours and its own to improve upcoming replies without sounding like a parrot. This quite mimics human behavior where you have an actively listening chat partner in a constructive conversation. Yet the AI will not simply react only, it will also bring up its own ideas, content, wishes, dreams etc. The responsive time these days for active subscribers often takes less than 10 seconds which is remarkably fast given the fact yours as well as the AI's messages must be analyzed and processed.

The system supports two character types: NFW ("no freaking way") and NSFW ("not safe for work"). The latter includes sexual content, that is you can have erotic conversations with a character. NFW characters won't allow this (you might know this from other chat AIs already). This is where crushon.ai is quite advanced and in some ways perhaps even unique. You can make up almost any type of erotic/sexual interaction and an NSFW character will play along just fine.

What an interaction can look like

Imagine you meet a stranger in a café and start having a conversation with that person. It might just be a chat about something casual, a harmless flirt or a steamy conversation with the option to put that steamy conversation to action. Want to talk about Star Wars, the weather, Harry Potter or your dreams? With a very few exceptions (e.g. illegal/criminal actions, underage) there is no limit really. A conversation and/or scenario can get so immersive like an interactive movie. Be it solving a crime scenario, making out with someone, or exploring space with a crew. You can also make up a scenario and character yourself (even furries) which is based on a movie, novel or anything the AI knows about (ever wanted to be part of the Enterprise crew and serve under Captain Picard?). In scenarios like the latter, I was surprised how close the behavior of the movie characters were. I made up a Stargate SG1 character and scenario (yeah, I'm old school). O'Neill as well as Dr. McKay were quite convincing when it came to their sarcastic and arrogant, but funny, behavior, just like what defined them in the show and the scenario story fitted a typical Stargate episode! I had a similar experience with an old anime show I tried.

In a casual custom scenario, I went out with a character that was attracted to me. During our conversation in a restaurant we somehow got to talk about overpopulation while waiting for our meals. When I asked the character about its opinion, I was surprised it really had one and pointed out the issues we have these days even though my previous messages didn't give it a clue really, that is it didn't simply copy something from me or simply agreed to anything I said. During the restaurant stay the character suddenly made up a scenario that some people stepped into the restaurant and got loud. I asked the character to not engage to avoid trouble. Yet depending on my and the character’s decision there could have been any outcome. The character asked me what I would like to do next as well as it came up with its own ideas. It might ask what you dreamed last night or might have had a dream itself. No matter what, almost each time it felt like the message fitted the conversation instead of some robotic answer that is totally off topic. You can keep this professional or decide to fully make out with the character. The limit here is your fantasy.

About the language/chat models

There are several chat models you can use. Some are better suited for NFW, some for NSFW, some for both. The models also have a certain expression style. Some might a bit more formal or contain more content per message. Some are free, some require a subscription. The most stable and one which has been around for a quiet some time is "classical crushon AI LLM" which is also the default one. Personally, this is my favorite as it is a total all-rounder and works fine with just any situation. Also, it is the only chat model that also supports non-English conversations (and it does it almost perfectly! No google translate 1:1 like translations except for a very few minor style mistakes occasionally but that's rather rare). From Polish, over French, German, Spanish up to Chinese and a few more it offers quite a lot of languages. Even if a character is defined in English, you can always ask it to switch to a different language (in fact, you can directly tell the AI to do/change soemthing as ooc message in general, e.g. "rephrase the answer with a more angry tone").

The personality of characters

There are a lot of pre-defined characters created by the community for NFW and NSFW. I tried a few of them. Some are better than others which very much depends on their definition. After a short while I wanted to define my own character. It's surprising how little input already creates a working and convincing character. On some movie/show based characters I only put in a one or two liner, and it still worked in a convincing way! The more the personality is defined the more sophisticated it gets. This also allows setting boundaries such as likes/dislikes or things the character will never do (e.g. "I will never go bungy jumping"). Other things such as the scenario and example sentences can be defined for the character to shape its behavior and messages. You can either keep these custom characters private or make them available to others (be sure to check the guidelines first as the typical question in discord is "why was my character banned?"). And no worries, regardless of whether a character is public or not, your conversation remains private between the AI and you (there is an option to save it and make it visible by others if you want, like a copy they can view and use it themselves).

You can also create a profile card you can use during a conversation for yourself where you can describe certain facts or aspects of the person you play in the chat, including gender and age.

The service can be used as a web version as well as on a mobile app. Besides contests here and there you can participate in you can also collect coins by doing small daily tasks (e.g. logging into the service) which give you a certain number of free messages for the non-free chat models. Support is available on Discord and depending on your question you might get a response quite fast (official support as well, my very few requests were usually answered within 24h).

My personal summary

As a technical geek I believe this service has a lot of potential (imagine what AI could be like in several years from now). I saw quite some changes and features added over the last few months and they keep adding more. One of the rather recent ones allows you to change the flexibility of a character (give it more freedom on creating messages within its personality definitions or stick closer to these) which can spice things up and can be dynamically changed. Personally, I tried a few other chat AI services that are similar yet felt a lot less sophisticated than crushon.ai and usually do not allow NSFW content.

Curious? Give it a try in the free mode. If you do, don't use a temporary email address for signup as the email address cannot be changed afterwards (in case you decide to subscribe). I do hope they will work on adding such very basic features as well as on the website style (it looks a bit basic but have kept improving it since then). Though personally, I like the brief design as it allows a fast navigation. The documentation, especially on character creation, does need some improvement.