In defense of AI roleplaying

AI RP gets a huge amount of hate in this sub. It's usually just reductively referred to as "AI boy/girlfriends," but that's really not a rational take on what's been going on lately.

AI RP includes lots of different use-cases and modes of interaction that range from things that are closer to multi-user chat rooms to one-on-one adventure games to research assistants.

And the best part is that almost all of the really interesting things are being done with local models now. You can go pick up a copy of KoboldAI with or without a SillyTavern front-end, and do just about anything.

There are deep reasoning models (like Qwen 3 Thinking) that can be used professionally, models that are fine tuned for fantasy roleplaying (like solo D&D), models that are coding-specific, models that are designed for vision (e.g. OCR or even describing photos for the blind), etc.

AI RP is a huge and growing niche and reducing it to just the sorts of activities that horny teenagers and lonely outsiders are going to inevitably put it to vastly undersells its value. Check out some of the communities around it. You'll find that many of people who are most active defy expectations.

Personal note: I've just started looking into this world recently, and have a moderate rig at home, so I can only run heavily quantized 20B models, at best. But it's pretty amazing. I've got models analyzing my photography, offering tips on conversations with family and friends, helping me stay focused, and even just acting as a sounding board for posts like this.

Some useful sources of info:

• SillyTavern front-end for managing characters/scenarios
• AI Horde a distributed AI infrastructure system for running local models.
• KoboldAI a back-end (and also a minimal front-end) for loading models for AI RP.
• Mistral AI one of the leading providers of local models used by the RP community, ranging from massive 600B parameter models that can only realistically be run on commercial infrastructure to tiny 4B models that most moderate gaming systems can manage. This is just one example, though, models are fine-tuned for using RP applications from Google, Alibaba, Meta, etc.