I stopped recommending my English-language learning friends try sesame.com after yesterday (3/11/2025) due to a serious downgrade in apparent quality of chatting abilities :(

Apparently changes made which were meant to tighten "safety" guardrails SERIOUSLY degraded the overall quality of the sesame.com experience. I haven't had a ton of time to play with it since yesterday, but a week or so ago I was really impressed and told a handful of English second language learning students I chat with to try Maya (because it always seemed like the smarter model) and let me know what they thought.

At first all I got was really positive feedback but since yesterday everyone has been saying that it doesn't seem very human or natural anymore. And let me emphasize this -- I don't believe for a second that these guys (and girls) are trying to do erotic roleplays with sesame.com. They have an honest interest in learning English and practicing with other English speakers but teachers are expensive and this seemed like a great option that was cheaper than chatgpt (free!) and more importantly better quality in many respects.

Now I'm back to telling those who can afford chatgpt plus (which isn't many when we're talking latin american people) to try AVM because it's uses a FAR superior model on the back end. It's just that Sesame's CSM model on the front end is (was so great) before it was hobbled by its creators.

Do the people at sesame.com realize what they've done? While they may have blocked a minority of their users from "misusing" this tool, they've cut off their nose to spite their face, so to speak. Dum dum dum dum dumb! Thoughts?