According to the 2023 Digital Generation Research Report of the Pew Research Center, 63% of the global 18-26 age range have ever utilized virtual emotional companionship services, and of those the proportion of NSFW AI Chatbot usage is as much as 41% (sample size =15,632) Confidence level: 95%±2.1%. The technological impulse for this phenomenon is the deep desire of Generation Z for immediate feedback: The average lag of response to conversation on mainstream platforms such as Character.AI is only 0.7 seconds (Cloudflare global node speed test data), considerably quicker than the average 12-second response time of human friends. For instance, in the NHK documentary case from Japan, by specifying the character parameters of the “sickly girlfriend” (with a dependence intensity of emotions at 85% and a chance of going dark of 30%), the system generated a conflict plot with 1024 tokens in 3.2 seconds. It has pushed the average daily usage time to more than 47 minutes (220% year-over-year growth for 2021).
On the financial side, the marginal cost trend of the NSFW AI Chatbot is precisely the trend of consumption by Generation Z. Data made public by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics states that the median disposable income of the generation is $1,450 per month, while the cost of subscription to such a service is just 2.1%-4.8% (9.99-29.99), much lower than the average charge of 80 times for offline dating . As of SensorTower in the first quarter of 2023, among the top 10 emotional apps in the world, the 30-day paid conversion rate of the ** NSFWAIChatbot product was as high as ** 14.7312.5, much higher than that of social software at 58.9 **. A case in point is the start-up company Anima, which specifically targeted Gen Z hashtags (# Virtual Boyfriend, # Social Anxiety Good News) on TikTok, with a whopping increase in MAU (Monthly active users) from 80,000 to 2.7 million (with a growth rate of 2,375%), with the customer acquisition cost (CAC) of 6.3 remaining intact.
Dr. Jean Twenge, cultural psychologist, observed in The Atlantic Monthly that Generation Z’s loneliness index (UCLA scale) is 37% higher than that of millennials. The NSFW AI Chatbot provides individual friendship with emotion modeling technology, such as the Affectiva engine with an emotion recognition accuracy rate of 89%. User experiments show that if designing a “trauma repair” script, the effectiveness of AI in getting users to calm down their emotions reaches 68% (control experiment n=200, p<0.05), close to 72% of expert psychological counseling. In the instance reported by KBS News in South Korea, a user referred to as some certain user achieved psychological venting using the “school bullying counterattack” narrative. The platform transferred the focus of its violence automatically to its 22% compliance level (a pre-established security threshold by the platform), and the interaction frequency during a week increased up to a record 43 times.
Competition at the regulatory level and iterative technology are accelerating their penetration: Meta’s open-sourced Llama 3-405B model reduces developers’ training expenses by 58% (Hugging Face benchmark test). The EU’s “Artificial Intelligence Act” limits the NSFW AI Chatbot’s age verification error rate to less than 0.1% (presently the system has a mean error rate of 3.7%). Despite its moral disputes, Grand View Research predicts that the market would grow at a CAGR of 29.4% from 2023 to 2030, with Generation Z representing more than 61% – perhaps this is when the revolution of human-machine proximity has infiltrated from the lab into digital natives’ daily life.