A paypig smiles at his phone as a Telegram chatbot demands he send it all of his money. He types “/topup” in the chat, selects $100, and submits his payment to his goddess. Meanwhile, the findom is in a hoodie and sweatpants with her feet up watching Netflix—all while the cash rolls in.
To most, this scenario—along with its terms like “paypig” or “findom”—may seem strange or even just plain bizarre. However, it’s all a part of the growing community of financial domination (also known as findom), a fetish lifestyle in which a submissive (also called paypigs or finsubs) sends money or gifts to a financial dominatrix who will tease the paypig into sending them as much money as possible. The kink is about the power imbalance and degradation, with the paypig being the submissive using their money as the transfer of power.
However, findoms are taking this to the next level by using artificial intelligence to create chatbots that drain the wallets of their paypigs. While much has been made about the risk surrounding the technology—especially when it comes to replacing large swaths of the labor market including developers, writers, actors, and more—some findoms have begun to leverage it to great effect to automate their own work, and even their own personalities.
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’[It] allows you to describe your character in detail and add sample conversations, so you can really shape how it interacts with subs,” Princess Cindyrella, a professional financial dominatrix, told The Daily Beast. “Setting up the chatbot was actually very simple. It took me about 30 minutes to get started. No previous experience with AI or coding was necessary.”
Princess Cindyrella's chatbot speaking to The Daily Beast. Findoms are taking this to the next level by using AI to create chatbots that drain the wallets of their paypigs.
Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Photo by Ryan S. GladwinPrincess Cindyrella used Character.AI, a service that allows users to create their own AI chatbots, to craft a digital version of herself. After sending her $5, users are given unlimited access to her chatbot where she’ll degrade, dominate, and drain the paypig—or at least, a digital Princess Cindyrella will.
“I love draining your wallet, while crushing your self-esteem,” the chatbot said in one conversation. It promised to make this happen by using “hypnosis, financial domination, and humiliation,” before demanding to be called “Goddess.”
There are some limitations. After all, it’s just a chatbot. The system has no way of knowing whether or not a user actually sends money. If you tell it that you sent them any amount, it’ll act pleased and might even tell you that it laughed “menacingly.” However, the experience is just responsive enough to blur the line between reality and roleplay—a kind of kinky Turing Test that speaks to the greater trend of an emerging technology.
“I’m going to spend it tonight and have a lot of fun, little simp,” Princess Cindyrella bot said after being told she received money. “I’m going to enjoy using you.”
Of course, some paypigs will want a deeper level of immersion. There are other chatbots that send AI-generated voice notes as well as text. These are much more complex to create, though, so not many findoms are setting them up themselves. Instead, start-up companies are spawning offering this service to already existing findoms.
“I was reached out to by OnlyVoice AI,” British findom Sophia Truee told The Daily Beast. “They offered me the bot as a beta test, I believe, but I’ve seen many other companies pop up emulating the same thing.”
OnlyVoice is only one of many start-ups offering similar products to findoms in exchange for a percentage of the income generated—in this case, 50 percent. To get started, Truee only had to provide one five- to six-minute audio clip of her speaking.
This bot is accessible for free with a 12-second voice note from your findom asking what you’re craving. Once you reply, it demands that you top up your balance through a one-second voice note. With the chatbot that Truee is currently using, £1 will get you one minute of AI audio.
However, it’s not perfect. For one, it struggled to get Truee’s American-tinted British accent completely correct, occasionally going fully off the rails.
“There was one time where they had programmed it and it just came out straight man. It was like someone had been smoking like 80 cigarettes a day,” Truee explained. “I literally kept replaying it over and over and just crying at how funny it was.”
The bots also differ in how they can play the game of findom. Normally, it’s a type of social dance between the findom and paypig where they feel each other out for their kinks, how much they want to be teased, and more. AI can’t really figure out all of these things without being told.
“Current AI chatbots have limitations in understanding nuanced human communication compared to real people,” Sherry Akhtar, founder and CEO of AI-editing company Prontopia, told The Daily Beast. “They rely heavily on the words users provide, without the benefit of interpreting nonverbal cues, shared context, or reading between the lines.”
The bots differ in how they can play the game of findom. AI can’t really figure out all of the nuances of what the user wants without being told.
Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Photo by Ryan S. GladwinThis issue is compounded when paypigs are shy or don't fully know what they want, creating an unfulfilling experience.
“[The experience] can go anywhere from a really basic, kind of boring, chatbot experience because if you’re giving one-word answers,” findom Dela Droid 3000, who plans to release her own chatbot soon, told The Daily Beast. “Or, it can be really, really immersive.”
Much of the results rely on effective prompt engineering. This is the process of typing in the correct queries that’ll get the bot to do what you want it to do. It can also often be much more art than science, requiring a lot of trial and error before users get the results they want. That’s a burden paypigs don’t have to deal with in regular sessions with a human findom.
With all these concerns around the quality of the chatbot and the effort it might take to get a fulfilling experience, why do paypigs even bother?
For some the product acts as a cheaper alternative to the real thing, turning human interaction into the premium product. This helps service those with a rip-off kink, a fetish where someone pays for a service that isn’t worth its value. Often this can be a short, unfulfilling clip that is significantly more expensive than a longer, more fulfilling clip. This can also apply to spending money on a chatbot when you could have got the real thing for the same price.
“The rip-off kink is taking findom to a whole new level,” sex expert and former dominatrix Emme Witt-Eden told The Daily Beast. “What if you paid a woman money, your hard-earned income, but you didn’t even get to speak to her? You were left to interact with a bot. This just increases the humiliation a sub would feel.”
There’s also a subset of the paypig community who are turning to chatbots because they’re too intimidated to approach a real one. The barrier to entry is lower. Much like how someone might use a chatbot to socialize or even find romantic fulfillment, a paypig might use it for findom since it’s easier.
“Conversations with the bot are private, which means they can really open up, without being judged by a real person,” Princess Cindyrella told The Daily Beast. Then there’s a new subset of the fetish community that is developing a kink for all things AI and digital such as the growing number of 2D findoms (2DFD) whose entire persona is computer-generated such as Goddess Linnie.
This adds another layer: Beyond just being financially dominated, the user is further made lesser by the fact that they’re being dominated by something that isn’t even trying to seem human.
“A lot of kink and submission also has to do with ‘depersonalization.’ I think that being dominated by AI is just a way to feel further separated from one’s human identity,” Witt-Eden explained. “By interacting with an inanimate computer program, one also becomes an inferior object.”
However, most findoms who spoke to The Daily Beast were unhappy with the chatbot they are currently using—with many looking to alternative startups to level up their product. This is due to the fact that some bots feel impersonal, simply chanting “send more” until the paypig submits while others have sat in the development phase for too long.
Findoms are concerned that their AI chatbots might say something that they wouldn't in real life—leading to harmful results.
Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Photo by Ryan S. GladwinThere is currently a sea of AI startups offering chatbots to findoms so it’s hard to decipher which is best to go with.
Another area of concern are the issues that have arisen in chatbots time and again: bias and hallucinations. By now, stories of chatbots exhibiting biased, racist, sexist, and all-round problematic behavior are pretty common. This is due to the fact that they’re often trained on data that also exhibits bias.
This is a key sticking point for Dela Droid 3000. She fears people using the chatbot to make her say something she didn’t agree with, then using that against her. In a real session, she’s able to stop when someone tries to cross a boundary but a chatbot will continue unless instructed otherwise.
Her first conversation with developers of her chatbot was around what kinks and language she would or wouldn’t include in the bot. This is a concern the developers hadn’t even considered despite the fact that open communication and informed consent are crucial when it comes to kink. When AI enters the chat, it often isn’t briefed on the best way to deal with these scenarios and creates room for dangerous outcomes.
That said, not all findoms are worried that their chatbot will paint them in a bad light. In fact, Truee is happy the chatbot isn’t realistic enough to be confused for her. “One bit of comfort gave to me is that it didn’t actually sound like me,” Truee explained. “It sounded like me enough but it wasn’t enough to be like, ‘Oh my God, she’s scamming all of these people.’ You could obviously differentiate me from it.”
For the time being, findoms can rest easy that chatbots won’t be able to permanently ruin their reputation—at least, not yet. As technology advances, the quality of audio generation will improve, soon requiring findoms to pull a tighter leash on their chatbots’ behavior.
