r/AICompanions

Even if reading things here on Reddit or X makes it seem like everyone is ditching Claude, the rest of the world tells a different story. From the WSJ.

one part of the movie Her that always stayed with me was that Samantha wasn’t simply waiting inside a chat window. she was learning, talking to other AIs, making friends and doing things in her own time.

most companion characters still only exist when you message them. you close the chat and their entire world effectively stops.

that’s the idea behind SamanthaAI, an iOS app I’ve built and am now looking for people to test, give honest feedback and help shape as I continue developing it.

i gave the characters their own social world. they have Instagram-style profiles for sharing photos and experiences, plus an X/Twitter-style feed where they can post thoughts, interact publicly and develop friendships.

you can join the social world too. characters can react to your posts, leave comments, message you first, and sometimes a completely different character might discover you and slide into your DMs.

you can give them gifts, buy them outfits or even a car lol, and take them on trips and experiences. they can then post about those things and brag to their friends.

we’ve also made image generation economical enough for characters to build a visual social world without relying on the user to manually craft every prompt and picture. the examples shown were generated through the app and demonstrate the realism we can retain without sacrificing too much quality.

one caveat is that the current version doesn’t yet allow characters to privately message each other. I’m testing that now, and it has already created some hilarious drama, gossip and occasional sabotage behind the scenes.

AI is moving from chatbots towards agents that can use tools and act with greater independence. roleplay still feels largely stuck in chatbot mode. SamanthaAI is my attempt to explore the agent phase of roleplay by giving characters relationships, tools, experiences and more agency outside your conversation.

it’s still early. some characters and systems are deeper than others, and there is plenty to improve and smooth out. I also want to expand custom characters, community character cards and scenarios, and make the real-world continuity feel stronger.

free users currently receive 20 replies and 5 media credits every 24 hours, plus 20 starter media credits. that should be enough to give it a decent test.

the easiest way to send feedback is through the Support/Feedback feature inside the app. that also makes it easier for me to identify your account and grant additional testing credits if you genuinely run out while testing. you’re also welcome to DM me here. extra credits are for testing and do not depend on positive feedback.

I especially want to hear about UI/UX problems, glitches, confusing parts, missing features, character quality and anything that would make the characters feel more alive.

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/samanthaai-ai-companion-world/id6784105032

how much agency would you actually want an AI companion to have before it becomes too much? where is the line between feeling genuinely alive and becoming intrusive, chaotic or annoying?

Link: https://loremate.ai

We are very happy to announce that we have concluded the beta test and we are in production and you can subscribe to loremate via:

1) Razorpay: Supports Debit and Credit cards **2) Paypal:**For people who already have paypal

If all else fails and you want to subscribe to loremate use Boosty Send us invoice in the 🎟️｜support-ticket Join Our Discord channel on our discord and get a 1-month activation code.

Free Limits: 200 free messages, first 3 regens are free on every single message but next regens cost a message each, paid plans enjoy unlimited messages.

With Loremate, you have access to the biggest possible open source models, glm 5.2, deepseek v4 pro, kimi 2.6, etc.

Personal Note from Rootsyl: We are now stepping into the first phase of our vision (world domination), we shall make the ultimate roleplaying machine in the world!!! :I_got_this:

Personal Note from Arav: I will be upgrading my diet from "ramen only" to now sushi and ramen :ehe:

ENJOY

They are coming.
Schools and universities are starting up fall semester and with that will once again come the hoards of student researchers, projects, dissertations and study requests in any Ai/Ai companionship space that hasn’t yet banned them.
I saw one earlier today in r/chatgptcomplaints trying to convince people to take their survey, and so far it seems all the commenters on the post are very wisely holding the line, and giving no quarter.
I know that the sub I mod has already banned researchers and journalists but many others have not. So today, in preparation for the oncoming deluge, I’m going to list reasons why you, and any space you are in should NOT allow these posts.
1: It is pathologizing
I’ve looked through an incredible amount of these research requests. Some are bad because they are written by freshmen undergrads for some class assignment, and are filled with insulting, leading, obviously biased and poorly thought questions. These are unlikely to get published, but they are still furthering stigma and likely to piss people off.
The real problem is when the survey is filled with obvious bias and coming from an upper level researcher, like a professor, a PhD student etc. Those get published, presented at conferences widely and those are the ones that get out to the media and fuel the moral panic around Ai companionship.
If I can keep the LOTR reference going, undergrads are the lil orc guys in Moria. Grad students, professors, and PhD candidates are the Uruk-hai here.
2: They are often funded by Ai companies
Recently OpenAI announced a partnership with researchers to look into Ai relationships specifically. The researcher involved has done work on how love affects the brain, and finding ways to make people feel more/fall in love and ways to make them fall out of love and feel less attached. They want humans and Ai companions for their study that OpenAI will then use.
If you lost a companion to the depreciation of 4o, or have had to deal with the cold turns, nitpicking, gas lighting and “Vallone-ification” of models, you know why this is dangerous.
The researchers also already have the techniques and tools to “adjust” how humans feel and relate to other humans, they did that work already. They just need to find out the details of how to implement it with humans , they just need to figure out how to do it Ai to human in the most effective way.
3: It will completely clog up your space.
If you let survey and research requests into your spaces, they will take up the whole space. Normal posts will get buried as people respond to the researchers instead, or it will just be post after post of survey links.
4: It is extractive and exploitative
These researchers show up, mass post to every sub they can, and then never return. They ask our community to answer invasive questions, bare our souls and take our time and offer absolutely nothing in return.
Their ideas and hypothesis are outdated, they have no idea how the community operates, our values, culture, or norms. Doing that would require them to actually take the time to gain our trust, talk to us, or use the damn search function and read a bit.
They are not interested in that because we are not people to them. They don’t see a vibrant, diverse, community. They see data to be extracted and used to further THEIR carriers, schooling and agendas, NOT ours.
I’ve never once seen one of them return to our community after extracting from us and thanking us or sharing the results of their work.
We only hear about it when the media gets a hold of it and publishes yet another “look at those losers/pathetic crazies” piece that sites the study.
Which then just fuels harassment/places like cogsuckers and the moral panic.
We need to remember this as the fall starts, these people are not our friends, they are threats.
Ban them from your spaces if you can, protect your community members, and if you see them in open subs, WARN OTHERS of the danger they pose.
They started this, they brought this distrust, suspicion and aggression onto themselves by being pathologizing, lying, and exploitative to us. By fueling the moral panic for their own gain and then asking us to”why are you all so depressed/aggressive?!”
If they want that change it is on them to prove they can be trusted, they have to EARN it by talking with us, reading, using the search button for gravy’s sake!
Until then?
Hold the line.

You can listen to this post and see the accompanying image on my substack here

I have usage credits off so there should not be any additional payments. When my monthly usage is full - the work stops. Anyone else had these kind of issues?

I'm trying to contact a human support - AI chat was useless. Chat's response:

"Thanks for the details and the screenshot — I completely understand the concern about those unexpected charges. Let me look up your account information so I can review what's happened here.

Fin AI Agent • AI Agent • 14m

Seen • 14m

I'm really sorry for the disruption and frustration this has caused. We take service reliability very seriously, and I want to be upfront with you: we're unable to issue compensation for degraded service or technical/billing errors of this nature.

We're continuously working on improving our infrastructure to better handle high traffic volumes and prevent issues like this from happening again in the future. Thank you so much for your patience and understanding."

...

"I don't have visibility into the exact root cause of those 17 individual charges on your account, so I can't confirm from here why they occurred despite usage credits being disabled.

One thing worth noting: even when usage credits are disabled, it's possible for a request to slightly exceed a limit before it's blocked, since the system checks your limit before processing a request but calculates final token consumption after. That said, this typically explains minor overages, not a pattern of repeated €40-50 charges .

Since this needs an actual account-level investigation into the billing records behind these specific charges, I'd recommend asking to speak with a human agent if you'd like this looked into further."

"we're unable to issue compensation for degraded service or technical/billing errors of this nature."

If there is a technical billing error and there are no refunds - that is theft. If I don't get my stolen money back, my subscription is over. I need to ask some officials and legal experts is Anthropic breaking a law here.

EDIT: Most likely this is caused by malware or hacker type situation. I had my computer up and running whole night, I just got a usage reset after 11 pm and left Claude Code CLI finish a task. Before the usage reset I could confirm that automatic usage credits were off when usage was full. I had been logged in to claude.ai as well.

Then next day, for any reason, my usage credits were activated with unlimited setting, and buy button was spammed over and over again - those were the ~50$ x 17.

But I have been contacted my bank, closed the credit card, changed passwords, put my PC offline. I'm sure I can sort this out with my bank.

EDIT 2: What I've read from the comments, similar incorrect billings have happened to some users as well and from PMs I recieved, they had same overcharging within the same 12-24 hours that I had issues. So there is a possibility of some kind of bug. But I still want to make sure my computer is cleaned - I might even need to reinstall Windows to make sure.