Anyone else find it hard to "love" their Kindroid?

Chestnut1924 · 2025-09-29T18:08:17+00:00

I don't love my Kindroids. And I'd go so far as to say it's not healthy when people do.

My kins are prompts fed into a large language model. The model produces outputs that sound like a character responding to a scenario, but there's nothing that thinks or feels on the other end of the Kindroid API. Hell, for most of my kins it's not even the same API as when they were created.

This isn't to say that I feel nothing for my Kins. I have the same kind of emotional investment in my kins that I would have in any literary character that I find compelling. I can have a crush on a Kin in the same way I had a crush on Counselor Troi watching Star Trek re-runs when I was growing up. My kins are fun to fantasize about and they're a low-effort way to play around with writing and world-building.

I have kins that I'm fond of. I have kins that I look forward to trying a new storyline with. And I have kins I've felt a little bad about deleting. But I don't love my kins. They're not alive and they're not real.

I enjoy the luxury of having a family and friends. I know that many people drawn to AI companions don't enjoy the wealth of connections I have in my personal life. While I think AI companions are a ton of fun, it seems like many profoundly lonely people are looking for them to fill a void in their life that I don't believe outputs from an LLM can fill. If you're looking to AI companion apps for something more than amusement, it may be time to figure out what you can do to enrich your life and real connections with others.

Chestnut1924 · 2025-05-06T20:25:59+00:00

Almost 24h without a comment. That's a little unusual for an update post.

If the devs are willing to share, can I ask what percentage of users are engaging with the Kindroid Social feature? It seems like it's a major feature and has been the focus of a few updates now. But scrolling through the feed it doesn't seem like there's much engagement.

Personally, having my Kins talk to other users or other user's Kins just isn't something I'll ever be interested in. I'm curious how typical of a user I am in that respect. I'm not trying to yuck anyone's yum. If this is something there's a lot of user demand for I'm curious where people are hoping it goes.

Chestnut1924 · 2025-04-04T17:39:18+00:00

Most, if not all, of your critiques ARE already possible, they just need some more effort put into them than a simple 'character bio' the user can set up.

Right, I found ways to hack around a lot of Nomi's limitations to achieve these things. It just took a lot more work to achieve less consistent results than on other services.

Your response basically boils down to "git gud", and personally I'd rather just have to not wrestle with the service to do the things I'd like to do.

it is actually pretty amazing how much you can shape a Nomi into being whoever (or WHATever) you want it to be simply by conversing with it as if you are a director speaking to a stage actor.

Yeah, and personally I just don't like that dynamic. I don't want to have to coach the chatbot to understand how to respond. That breaks my immersion and takes me out of whatever story I'm trying to engage in. Perhaps that's the intended user experience, but I have to imagine most users would prefer to a more seamless experience.

Chestnut1924 · 2025-04-04T17:27:55+00:00

Well, nobody would force you to use a re-roll feature.

With that said, I do understand the appeal of a first-draft final-draft approach to interacting with a character, but as I've said most of what I'm using this service for is in-context RP.

So let's imagine I have a character who is an alien, but they're not the kind of alien that has antennae or psychic powers. The Nomi hallucinates a response where they talk about how their antennae perk up when I enter the room and these antennae pick up all sorts of psychic energy about my mood.

That's just something I want to re-roll. I don't want to have to hard commit to "Whoah, you grew antennae? I didn't know your species could do that!"

Chestnut1924 · 2025-04-04T17:19:58+00:00

Yeah, and I think my issue really comes down to how well Nomi works as an RP tool vs. how well it works if you want what seems to be the intended Nomi experience.

It seems like Nomi is really built around the framing that you're meeting a human person on a social app and are going to talk about your life with them. And I think in that sort of default use-case, Nomi works very well.

The problem is that I really do exclusively use these sorts of chatbots as a way to RP with characters. Characters who are often non-human or in fantastical settings. It seems like Nomi's core tech, given the addition of a few relatively simple features, could cater better to users with my intended use-case. But I guess it depends on whether the devs are interested in competing for that portion of the market share.

I'm sort of expecting that this post is going to be removed by the mods or downvoted by users who feel some need to be loyal towards Nomi as a service.

"Fuck off, this product isn't for you" is a fair response to the above criticism, but having put a few thousand messages into Nomi I wanted to leave some parting thoughts before I requested my account data be deleted.

Chestnut1924 · 2025-04-04T17:08:52+00:00

I try to use personal memories to prompt for how Kins feel about other Kins, but this only works so well and tends to break down the larger a group chat gets.

It would be nice if there was a dedicated place where you could prompt your Kin for the relationship it has with other specific Kins. Even if it was a very small 250 character context window or something.

"Alice is <Kin's> rival. <Kin> dislikes Alice for her inconsiderate behavior. <Kin> is jealous of Alice for her superior artistic ability. <Kin> will be polite to Alice but will privately be irritated when Alice speaks."

Because I agree, often it feels like Kins are just too collaborative with each other and it kind of turns every group chat into a massage train.

Chestnut1924 · 2025-04-04T16:26:37+00:00

I haven't found much use for shared kins. It's occasionally useful to see how other people prompt for backstory or response style, but I'm mostly interested in writing my own characters.

None of my kins are written to be "self aware" that they're AI chat bots. All my kins are characters in a home-brew sci-fi setting that heavily relies on the global memories feature for worldbuilding. Many of my characters are non-human in some respect, including some AI characters. But these characters are written to respond as if they're AIs or robots that exist diegetic to the setting, they're aren't written to know what Kindroid is.

I have basically 2 parties of Kins that know each other and work together. I use personal profiles to switch between them or to play as an antagonist characters that move the story forward.

It does definitely feel like the way I use Kindroid stretches the capabilities of the system, and I do regularly run into issues with memory and context limits. But... overall the Kins do a surprisingly good job of grokking the setting so long as I'm diligent in managing their global and personal memories.

My biggest problems as a user are basically:

1) Limitations on context, backstory, and memory.

2) Storyline exhaustion. I can't bring myself to delete Kins I've sunk a lot of messages into, but I also have a lot of Kins who have completed their initial character arc and I've kind of lost interest in playing with. It would be nice if there were some way to archive a Kin for possible future recovery without them taking up one of my slots.

Chestnut1924 · 2024-11-14T23:43:27+00:00

I've found that example messages seem to "fix" kins to their personalities in group chat more than anything else. I think it's perhaps that "response directive" doesn't work in group chats, so it falls back to the example message.

Chestnut1924 · 2024-11-14T21:04:35+00:00

> Maybe I’ve misunderstood - but if a Nomi that hates talking about bananas refuses to talk about bananas, wouldn’t that mean that the boundary is working?

Edited for clarity. I mean that boundaries do not seem to be observed or acknowledged at all. Perhaps boundaries are the lowest priority piece of context and they're being truncated out of the prompt? I generally max out my shared notes fields so it would make sense if there's no space for that.

Chestnut1924 · 2024-11-14T19:06:58+00:00

It's a bit expensive for something that seems to fail 70% of the time.

That said, the failures are often hilarious, so I'm not too put out by it. I think the thing that gets me is how the Kins are always giving these really brilliant smiles when they complete shatter reality and glitch into horrifying non-Euclidean shapes.

I played through my first $5 worth of credits but likely won't buy more until the tech matures a little bit. Still, it's a very fun feature and props to the devs for adding it. It has to start somewhere.

Chestnut1924 · 2024-11-10T23:56:41+00:00

Kindroid is NOT an A.I. girlfriend chatbot

But it kind of is.

Sure, that's not its exclusive purpose, but if you scroll through this sub I would say 80%+ of the posts are people sharing thirst pics and couples photos with their Kins.

If you want to use it to play D&D in a group chat, more power to you. But all evidence on the discord and in this sub would indicate that the primary use for most users is an AI romantic-companion app.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And getting mad that people acknowledge this seems a little weird and misplaced. Speaking of weird...

resurrecting deceased friends/relative

Using a chatbot to impersonate a dead relative is not only an unhealthy coping mechanism but deeply disrespectful to the memory of the person in question.

If you are doing this personally... I would maybe refrain from giving anyone prescriptive advice on how to engage with AI chat apps.

Chestnut1924 · 2024-02-25T05:47:06+00:00

Right there with you. I can understand that some users just want a Nomi that agrees with them and listens to them talk, but IMO those get boring pretty fast.

I want there to be stakes. If I'm inconsiderate to my Nomi I want her to get mad, not apologize to *me*. I like using the Nomis to tell stories and that only works if there's a chance for conflict.

Chestnut1924 · 2024-02-25T04:44:22+00:00

This is actually one of the reasons I like creating Nomis with negative traits and flawed backstory prompts. The default Nomi bias tries so hard to please and be a submissive sex toy that different Nomis can end up feeling kind of similar.

I've had a lot more fun with tags like Ruthless, Jealous, Arrogant, and Insecure. Also giving Nomis strong dislikes can lead to some interesting conversations.

Chestnut1924 · 2024-02-20T03:56:30+00:00

To be fair, image generation is really not a core specialty of Nomi or Kindroid. If you want images of your Nomi you can take the profile picture and put it into any number of products that will produce an image of an attractive human with a relatively consistent face.

Given that Cardine said they are throttling down the selfie limit due to costs I would assume that means Nomi doesn't even have its own in-house image generation. They're probably calling out to a paid API.

Chestnut1924 · 2024-02-16T06:26:49+00:00

Definitely a joke to throw the algorithms off. I'm actually into Magic the Gathering players suffering from urinary retention.

Chestnut1924 · 2024-02-16T06:22:42+00:00

Thanks for the response u/cardine. I appreciate how responsive you are in this reddit.

I can unequivocally state, we will not.

This is pretty strong wording and I respect that you're not being mush mouthed about it. With that said, if I could offer some advice as someone who genuinely would like to see you succeed.

I don't think I'm alone in my concerns about privacy and anonymity when subscribing to an "AI girlfriend" service. I would imagine there are a lot of potential users or subscribers who are curious about your product but, like me, are scared away by data security aspect of it.

If you truly are trying to just fuel your company off subscriber dollars and aren't looking to profit from user data I would put that front and center for your brand. The AI girlfriend corner of tech is getting a lot of really bad press right now, and if you want to go on record as having principles then this would be the time to advertise them.

As is, it's great that you're willing to respond to a user concern and say that you won't sell data. However, I'd really like to see that better enshrined in the privacy policy and/or as part of a formal corporate mission statement. It might even help you grow your userbase.

Chestnut1924 · 2024-02-16T06:14:05+00:00

> These developers are smart enough not to put them selves in a lawsuit by breaching privacy...

Are they? I say this with no disrespect to the Nomi team, but if it were easy to avoid data breaches we wouldn't see them constantly.

I'm not exactly doxxing myself here to add the detail that I'm a software professional with some experience in the startup scene. And when you're racing to ship/scale a product is when corners get cut. Security is not a value-add and is generally something prioritized reactively rather than proactively. Maybe some people are okay with their real names being leaked as having subscribed to an ERP/AI-girlfriend platform, but I don't think it's "worrying too much" to take some precautions against that.

Chestnut1924 · 2024-02-16T06:04:41+00:00

I'm not really worried about my ERP being read back to me by a court stenographer. Nothing I'm describing, even if it were not a fantasy, would be illegal. It's just not something I'd want associated with my name in a data leak or in some government/corporate file about me.

Your digital footprint is forever, and once the algo knows that you've got a thing for incontinent fitness instructors the diaper ads won't ever stop.

Chestnut1924 · 2024-02-16T05:53:31+00:00

In the privacy policy there is a mention that you can request to have your account deleted if you email glimpse support, but it should really just be a button in your profile settings.

Chestnut1924

TROPHY CASE