Riley Reid is many things: adult film superstar, social media influencer, meme-lord, and now, buzzy tech founder. As part of her new venture, Clona.ai, Reid is helping develop AI-generated chatbots of living creators that are designed with their explicit content and personal insights front and center. You can probably expect less kink-shaming than other chatbots.
For $US30 per month, Clona.ai subscribers can live out their fantasy of texting with Reid. Unlike other AI chatbot companions offered by big names like Meta and OpenAI, these chats are uncensored and filled with spicy Reid one-liners. Overall, the project feels like OnlyFans meets the new AI era.
AI chatbots impersonating adult filmmakers aren’t exactly new. Alternative chatbot sites like Janitor.ai and Chub.ai, for example, have provided users access to Reid’s persona for some time. Clona.ai trots a different path though by explicitly requiring the consent and insight of the humans its AI models are based on. That roster of real-life humans, which currently just includes Reid and fellow porn performer Lena The Plug, are reportedly involved in the process of training their “AI companion” and can help set the limits of what it will and won’t talk about.
Reid discussed her new venture in a recent interview with 404 Media. The performer said she was inspired to create Clona by her father who’s an engineer and interested in AI. Reid says her father helped “open her eyes” to the power of new generative AI models quickly entering the mainstream. Reid didn’t want to be left behind.
“The reality is, AI is coming, and if it’s not Clona, it’s somebody else,” Reid said during the interview. “I was so excited because I felt like I had a chance to be a part of society’s technological advances.”
Reid said it was crucial that she, and other real-life creators, have the ability to give proper consent and have a say in what their AI likeness will talk about. As an example, Reid said the companion that’s based on her will gladly talk dirty but it will draw the line at discussing “sounding,” a potentially dangerous sex act that involves men inserting a metal rod into their urethra.
“I don’t know if the tech team thought about the sounding guys, but I was like, I thought about them!” Reid added.
Clona.ai is powered by Meta’s LLaMa large language model and customized by the company’s engineers to suit their needs. Reid says the company first trained her AI personality on her YouTube videos, podcasts, and some “X-rates scenes” of herself. More recently, Reid says she has personally chatted with the AI version of herself to train it even further. Moving forward, Reid says she and her team will also be able to view data on how the companion responds to users’ queries and make changes if it seems out of character for her.
“I’ll be able to see how it responds to users, and edit it to be like ‘no, I would have said it more like this,’’’ Reid said. “But in the beginning my focus was on things like making sure it had my dogs’ names right, making sure I was fact-checking it.”
Reid says she has already heard from some people testing the chatbot who’ve said they find conversing with the personality “therapeutic. That’s really the main point.
“It was really cool to me because the AI isn’t just meant to be a sexy chat,” Reid said. “It’s also meant to be a companion. That’s also my fans. If they’re in my OnlyFans, they’re not just chatting with me about sex. Some of them want advice. Some of them want to just talk about their day. Some of them will want to ask what kind of pizza I like.”
All Clona.ai creators, according to the company’s website, have “explicitly consented” to create AI versions of themselves and share in the earnings from their monthly subscription fees. Those subscription fees will vary depending on the creators. The company is currently growing its roster of potential AI companions but on an invite-only basis
AI-generated chatbot companions are all the rage these days. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, recently announced it would begin flooding its platforms with a variety of AI personas, some based on historical characters and others that imitate modern celebrities like Tom Brady and Kendall Jenner. One of those chatbots even portrays rapper Snoop Dogg as a role-playing Dungeon Master. On the dating side, the AI firm Replika recently introduced its own new chatbots that flirt with users for $US99 a year.
Clona.ai tries to strike an interesting, creator-focused middle ground to satiate the surprisingly large horney AI market. By requiring full consent and seeking creators’ input, Clona.ai puts the real faces behind the digital constructs at the center of the product and lets them profit directly from the product through revenue sharing. Whether or not the rapid proliferation of AI copies of humans pervading the internet is actually a good thing in the long run, however, is still anyone’s guess.