There are a tonne of AI companion apps out there now, lot of them focused on nsfw, it's going to be interesting to see if character.ai is an isolated case, or if it's a domino effect.

I doubt the NSFW-focused ones have taken on venture funding. They're probably leaner shops with a dramatically smaller userbase that is more likely to actually pay.

Before Grok locked down its video generation tools the amount of high-quality and stunningly realistic looking porn you could generate was insane. You’re going to need something like that in order to make billions of dollars in this space. I don’t think anyone is going to take the time/money and deal with all the legal implications that comes from training a video generation model like though.