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[flagged] Open-source, uncensored alternative to CharacterAI (opencharacter.org)
37 points by bobcoi on Oct 18, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 29 comments


code: https://github.com/bobcoi03/opencharacter

I built this because users where angry at c.ai for shutting down the old site and implementing more filters and censors.

So I rebuilt the old ui and used models on OpenRouter to power everything

Have nearly all the features, edit, regenerate, public/private characters, personas.


Is there any censorship in this space which you think is acceptable, or is all censorship inappropriate, in your opinion.

Obviously, the public gets no benefit when you censor some guy from doing his business in private.

But you're also in danger of providing sexualised child characters for people to jerk off to.

How do you square all of this, I'm interested in hearing how you approached this problem


> Obviously, the public gets no benefit when you censor some guy from doing his business in private. > But you're also in danger of providing sexualised child characters for people to jerk off to.

I would say that anything is fine in private, even that. Better than them looking for the real thing, right? I guess some people are afraid that such content will actually turn people into pedo's, but I don't think that's true any more than watching gay porn will turn you gay.


Please do not attempt to find nuance in the argument "CSAM is bad".


CSAM is bad, no nuance. Which is why I welcome an alternative that could collapse the entire CSAM market and therefore save thousands of lives.

But, this is probably not the forum for this topic anyway. I understand that there are many complications to this, including the risk for normalization.


I think I'm taking the Twitter approach. As long as it is not illegal it's fine


Can you explain more about how you settled at 'fine' when it comes to providing sexualised child characters for pedos to jerk off to?

Like, is there not some part of that which you feel less than 'fine' about?

I'm not saying that you're wrong or need to stop - just very curious about how/whether you approached the issue.


do you imagine caring about pixels is moral and good behavior? isnt it demented and unhinged to concern yourself?


Not author, but these are just pixels.


That isn't the Twitter approach. Twitter bans legal content all the time.


How do you know if it’s illegal?


There's a reasonable philosophy where toolmakers don't involve themselves in fine, disputed, and frequently changing cultural differences.

It's one thing to build guardrails into tools where the impact is immediate and catastrophic, like a safety guard on saw, so that people don't permanently lose a finger to distraction or casual negligence.

It's a different thing -- to be reasonably argued both for and against -- to build guardrails against concerns that are abstract, indirect, cultural, political, etc

And you can tell that your example is more cultural than catastrophic because not everybody frets over what people do by themselves and in their own mind.


For public consumption, yeah I think it's reasonable to censor the most egregious stuff, but for private use there's really no point. If people want something, they will always find a way to get it. 100% of the time. There is absolutely no amount of censorship or even laws that can prevent it.

Censoring anything meant for private use seems like a pretty pointless exercise. It will either get un-censored, or users will find what they want elsewhere.

E: You also need to ask yourself: assuming that you can't simply suppress other people's desires for things you find objectionable (because you can't), would you rather they use fictional CP with fictional people, or the real deal with real children? Because the real thing very much exists and is quite available despite the laws and social stigma. If you make some vain attempt to prevent anyone from ever creating fictional CP, then what do you think those people will get next?


How is openrouter working out?


really nice. Just one API you get access to 100+ models

If I want to change models I just change one line of code.

Pricing is pretty fair as well they just charge a % on top


Do you think you'll switch to running local models at some point e.g. LambdaLabs/Runpod running Llama to reduce costs? Just thinking about as you scale and wanting to reduce cost per token. (I'm not in the GPU hosting biz - just curious because I think we're all thinking about this)


great project, any plans to implement voice chat features?


Requires a Google sign-in to chat, not ideal for such a sexualised service.


Don't worry, once Google catches wind of "thing they don't like" they will kill the oauth connection.


Glad to see more people in this space, we are also working on something similar. Congrats on shipping!


The thing I like best about character.ai is their TTS. Does anyone have an idea what engine they use? I don't suppose they invented their own system from scratch.


Character.ai does invent everything from scratch (for better and worse).


seems you're using both open & closed source models

i just tried it out. solid, but doesn't seem as uncensored or capable as e.g. https://uncensored.com/ai

btw: do u know whether c.ai actually parses tone/emotion from voice (or just from the SpeechToText stream?


how do you plan to compete with Dippy AI? They have a similar thesis and a better design imo


Why compare this to Dippy AI of all things? Looks like a platform/app targeting a different type of AI character consumer. Also I see nothing about Dippy being open source.


Can we please not have the HN front page be weird porn?


It was a bit surprising to click this link on my VPN. Wish it had a NSFW tag. Uncensored is a bit of a crapshoot when it comes to GenAI, half of the time is just means "no instruction tuning."


The link should probably just be the GitHub repo. It's an interesting project and discussion topic (although maybe a little flamewar inviting), but it doesn't seem necessary to link to the product itself in this case.


For those downvoting, click the link. The HN url should have been https://github.com/bobcoi03/opencharacter

The URL submitted tells nothing about the project and immediately displays questionable images.




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