u/Neo_Shadow_Entity

Image generated by ChatGPT 5.5

You know, it’s been a long time since I last used any Perchance chat. Probably not since last year, back when they were promising updates that were supposed to make the model better. After that, I only used the image generator a few times, but I didn’t notice any improvements. If anything, the opposite. I have no idea how much the chat itself has changed, but the posts on this subreddit give a pretty decent general picture of the situation. And it’s not an encouraging one, at least not for now.

But this isn’t another feedback post about the flaws of the Perchance update, like some people might assume at first. It’s more a collection of my observations and thoughts about the overall state of AI and the direction everything is heading in. So I’d like to share a story, if anyone gives enough of a shit to read this entire wall of text.

So after taking a break from Perchance, I decided to check out other models and roleplay platforms. Perchance was actually the thing that first introduced me to the world of AI roleplay, so I was curious to see what else was out there. I tried web-based models like Grok and DeepSeek, for example. I also spent a lot of time on ChubAI - one of the many specialized platforms where you could hook up a bunch of free models (mostly through OpenRouter) and tweak their parameters. That’s where I found and lost a lot of good and bad free models. Some of them were uncensored too, either fully or with jailbreaks.

So imagine my surprise when I started seeing the exact same "white knuckles", "bitten lips", and "hitched breaths" across different models. That’s when I realized that ALL of these models are basically stealing from each other, copying information from one another wholesale, including the exact same nonsense. They copy writing style too, even formatting habits like em dashes and so on.

By using lots of models at the same time, I noticed how many of them seemed to improve and get worse almost simultaneously. It was as if AI across the entire world temporarily got dumber, then smart again. At this point it doesn’t surprise me that much anymore. With new updates, developers try to make models more efficient. But in practice that often makes them cheaper first, not smarter. Sometimes developers are willing to sacrifice "intelligence" in exchange for a larger context window. I noticed something like that with DeepSeek: after the context was expanded, the model actually became worse at roleplay.

And then the "avalanche of shit" happened.

For a long time, Chub remained the last major stronghold of creative freedom among platforms like this. Pretty much anything was allowed there except photos of real children (and I think animals too). But then suddenly, there it was - censorship. According to rumors, the UK authorities threatened the owner with arrest, so he was forced to ban certain tags. Then they launched an AI filter that started banning anything it didn’t like. But I knew it wouldn’t stop there. Wherever censorship appears, it only spreads like a plague. And recently they were forced to impose restrictions on the free model and move to a crypto payment system because of pressure from payment processors demanding that even more "unacceptable" tags be banned. In other words: the rollout of full censorship in the finest traditions of Orwell’s 1984. More than one great platform has gone downhill this way. But I’m not going to get into why it’s absurd to ban fictional characters or restrict creative freedom in any way.

All of this got me thinking about the future of AI in our lives and where its development is heading overall. People have seen this pattern before: first they try to ban and restrict something, and then eventually it just becomes part of everyday life. They tried to ban porn the same way once. Then there was the moral panic over violent video games. Now they’ve moved on to AI.

People are a herd of frightened animals. Highly organized, sure - but animals. Whenever something radically new and unfamiliar appears, it scares people, and for some it triggers outright panic. Politicians and the leaders of every kind of social group and ideology immediately exploit that fear. They try to ban it as quickly as possible so they can bring it under their control. Because censorship is the best possible tool for controlling a frightened herd.

“You are forbidden from harming fictional characters! Because that will make you do the same thing in real life. Thank you for your attention, and now if you’ll excuse me, I have to fly off to a secret island. There’s a party there where powerful people will be raping real underage sex slave girls. But YOU don’t forget about AI restrictions!”

Something like that.

That’s why I keep noticing more and more people installing SillyTavern and using free models through OpenRouter. Some even run models locally if their hardware allows it. Because that way you have almost no restrictions, and you can still find good models with decent context size. On OpenRouter, some models have a low level of censorship, while others need jailbreaks. Unfortunately, most of them are censored, and sometimes even jailbreaks don’t help.

A local model is a different story. Completely autonomous and unrestricted. The problem is that, for now, the technology still doesn’t let us run truly massive, genuinely smart models on the level of ChatGPT or Claude locally. But the key words there are "for now".

Right now I look back at the past and see the era of prehistoric giant computers with tiny amounts of memory, when games fit on four floppy disks. I see personal computers with 64 MB of VRAM. I remember when 4 GB of RAM was considered a lot. I remember ChatGPT taking its first revolutionary steps and being veeeeeery stupid by modern standards (way dumber than Perchance on its worst day). And I realize just how massive a leap technological progress has made.

If technological progress doesn’t slow down, then in the near future everyone will be able to run models on the level of today’s ChatGPT locally on their own PCs. No restrictions. No censorship. AI is developing at an accelerated pace right now. Maybe we’ll live to see real AGI or even ASI with our own eyes.

And then we’ll look back on these awkward early models that constantly forgot things, repeated stupid phrases, and talked about ozone and white knuckles. All of that will be left in the past. And ahead of us, in that bright future, there will be super-intelligent models whose writing and awareness surpass even the greatest authors in human history. These models will remember EVERYTHING. They’ll never repeat themselves. They’ll never write nonsense. They’ll be perfect.

New generations will listen to our stories about old AI models the same way we listen to stories about ancient computers from before the Windows era.

And on top of that, we’ll eventually have hyper-realistic private-purpose androids whose personality and appearance we’ll be able to customize however we want, whenever we want. 😉😄

What do you think about DeepSeek's political biases compared to other chatbots?

Ran the same hard physics prompt through three video models on one key: a sprinter mid-run, shot from the side and tracking alongside, the kind of clip where gait, weight, and fabric give the model away. Seedance 2.0, Gemini Omni Flash, and Kling 3.0, several tries each. No clean winner, which surprised me.

Gemini Omni Flash: my favorite overall. Understood the prompt instantly, no false content flags, and the body physics held up best. The one knock is the slightly slow, low-frame-rate look Google models drift into.

Seedance 2.0: easily the best-looking of the three. Most visually striking, cleanest lighting, most cinematic frame. Honest take though, I expected the physics to be the most accurate and it was not quite top there. Gorgeous, not the most physically correct.

Kling 3.0 Pro: the frustrating one. It kept flagging a plain running scene as adult content and misread the prompt a few times. When it finally rendered, lighting and frame rate were great, but the body motion looked off and a bit unstable.

The reason I could do this side by side at all: all three sit on one OpenAI-compatible key, so it was just swapping the model name, no three separate setups and bills.

My read is pick by shot: Omni for believable motion, Seedance when you want the prettiest frame. Which would you rank first?