How OnlyFans star Riley Reid plans to 'immortalize' herself using AI
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- Adult-content and OnlyFans star Riley Reid has created an AI chatbot based on herself.
- The tech, now in beta, will soon allow other creators to build "digital copies" of themselves.
- Reid said she sees AI as a way to "immortalize" herself and interact with fans for years to come.
The adult-content and OnlyFans star Riley Reid recently launched an AI platform, Clona, with a chatbot based on herself.
Reid said the rise of artificial intelligence will give her the chance to build relationships with her fans without sacrificing her personal time.
"I'm married. I'm a mother. I'm trying to do multiple businesses," Reid told Business Insider. "This gives me an opportunity to immortalize myself and still be in that field without investing my full self. I feel so lucky I've had the opportunity to create Riley Reid as a mainstream name. I really want to utilize that."
Reid has been in the industry for over a decade, primarily shooting mainstream adult content, and said she'd never had much interaction with her fans. Even when she got onto OnlyFans, where chatting with creators is a key feature, she mostly kept her privacy, and found it difficult to make time to respond and communicate with all her fans.
Reid said she envisioned AI as a way to make this easier, and allow her fans to interact with her on a personal level for decades to come, even when she decides to stop shooting videos, or gets too busy with other projects — like the clothing brand she founded with her husband.
Clona
How Clona was built, and how it works
Clona is currently in beta, and offers chatbots for Reid and Lena The Plug, another adult-content creator. Reid cofounded Clona based on an idea her team had when they began noticing the success of AI chatbots like ChatGPT. They partnered with a team engineers and programmers to build a product that would reflect Reid's vision.
Users can exchange five messages with the chatbots for free; for unlimited chatting and voice notes, the service costs $30 a month.
The platform was created using a proprietary large-language model based on Meta's Llama, but "heavily modified and fine-tuned," a company spokesperson told BI.
Meta recently launched its own AI chatbots that are loosely based on celebrities like Paris Hilton and Tom Brady. For example, Hilton's AI version is a true-crime lover and detective called Amber, while Brady's is Bru, a "wisecracking sports debater who pulls no punches," according to a Meta blog post.
Clona is different, and made to replicate the experience of chatting to real-life creators, rather than offering a new fictional character based on an existing person.
To create a chatbot that would resemble Reid as closely as possible, the AI was fed hundreds of hours of her audio and video content, from podcast interviews to adult scenes, along with the entirety of her social-media history.
Reid also fact-checked its output to make sure that it would represent her accurately, and that it would approach certain topics, like thorny political or social issues, in a firm but polite way.
"One of my biggest things is, I believe that trans people should have rights," Reid said. "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I have my own political beliefs. If someone says something that is anti trans, or transphobic, how does my AI respond in a politically correct way that says like, 'Hey, I don't agree, I love the trans community'? I don't want my AI to just skip over trans rights, I want her to have my actual opinion."
While the chatbot is meant to replicate Reid's personality, the creator also wanted users to be able to cater to their own desires. Unlike the "Riley Reid" character that she embodies in adult movies, which has always stayed pretty much the same, with the similar appearance and "girl-next-door" roles, the AI will be more customizable.
"Riley is a persona, and from this persona that you fantasize about you're able to create a version that is more suitable to your specific needs," she said. "You can request your AI Riley to give herself a purple mohawk if that's what you're into, because real-life Riley would never do that."
Reid says fans will be able to build a 'form of human connection' with the AI
The company said it plans to open up the platform to any creator or celebrity who wishes to create a "digital copy" of themselves in the future, but that the team is still working on refining the AI model and understanding the reaction from the public. Reid added that because the AI needs to be trained to resemble the real person closely, the process of refining it can be time consuming.
Running a proprietary large-language model is also expensive, and the company is looking to cut costs, which currently sit at about $30,000 a month just for cloud services.
In the meantime, thousands of users have been testing the platform. The Clona spokesperson said the company had been surprised at the type of intimate relationships that users had already built with the AI, and the companionship that had resulted from it — beyond the interactions based on sexual content.
"I like that my AI has a form of human connection because she's based off of a real person," Reid said. "She has my life and everything. People always care for human connection, and that's always going to exist."