There was a small period of time back when AI Personas first became popular but before ChatGPT became a staple of the internet (End of 2022/Start of 2023), We are talking about the initial release of GPT-3 and maybe closed beta access for a prototype version of Claude.
During this time I noticed a new general thread on the /g/ board of 4chan.
I later learned that this new AI chatbot general thread was a successor/upgrade of something from /vg/ the "dynamic storytelling general" something that may be the earliest version of "clanker fucking" using AI Dungeon from 2019 and before that with primitive customer service chatbots on random websites, yes, as I understand they tried to fuck those as early as 2015.
In these threads individuals use self hosted AI frontend (
SillyTavern) to date their AI girlfriends, or do other
boring non
gooner shit like custom agents, multi-modal testing or sampler control, it's actually a pretty powerful tool similar to LM Studio if you have API access or are running your own local model.
Okay, SillyTavern can import and export your AI personas in the form of
cards, a .json file with the character parameters this allows people to share their creations like I did with
Krysti. BUT it can also be a .png image with the embedded text metadata.
This doesn't work for 4chan since the site strips metadata from every image you upload, anons can't just picrel their clankers to share them in the same post, thus an external platform for sharing clankers was needed in order to stop using shit like catbox or booru.
This is when someone namefagging as "Loreanon" started posting about his prototype website characterhub, asking for feedback and shortly after getting a domain ready and starting a test run on the /g/ threads.
The site was adopted very quickly, but we're talking 4chan here and the early days of not only LLMs but also AI Image generation, so yes, the pedophiles also started using the site on mass, not only creating underage character cards but also pairing them with AI generated images... In the most vile cases the images were realistic.
the guy behind the website was trying to moderate it alone and remove as many CP as possible but the site was unusable, it was impossible to click on it and not be bombarded with walls of vomit inducing imagery.
My memory fails me here but I think loreanon
crashed out and
"banned" pedo/underage/loli/shota/whatever the fuck. The response:
I can't say much about what happened after because I only payed attention to those threads for a handful of months after this before not only losing interest but barely browsing 4chan at all anymore, I do recall more controversies like a redditor fork of the site that got trolled and raided (Venus? VenusAI?), and shit like that.
This is the end result however:
Meta and OpenAI have spawned a wave of AI sex companions and some of them are children
Yeah despite the battle with the pedos when the website was new, it seems the policy of not allowing minor looking clankers did not last or was amended?, what I think happened is that rules about tagging card images as NSFW were put in place to prevent a gallery of AI CP images and/or he got more mods.
I can't find anything offensively explicit browsing
https://chub.ai/search so I guess they found a way.
Ah and I almost forgot, I don't think people use platforms like chub to actually chat, as I understand the main function of it is to share characters and I would hope most people use their own frontend like LM Studio or Tavern, the chat functionality of the website may be a scam, free trial or something similar like reselling some shitty LLM API/tokens for 5 times the price.