If you were a fan of Playboy Playmates in the 1990s, you might like this nostalgic technology trip. With AI technology, Oh is bringing five of the Playmates back so they can chat with you. And they will look just like they did back in the 1990s — about 30 years ago.
The AI bodies are based on images of the real women, and the technology uses samples from the real voices from the living Playmates — Brande Roderick, Carrie Stevens, Elke Jeinsen, Shauna Sand and Colleen Shannon — so you can have conversations with them and, ahem, do other stuff via the mobile service dubbed OhChat.
Oh has done this British reality TV star Katie Price as well as model and actress Carmen Electra. I’m not sure how I feel about this not-safe-for-work (NSFW) time machine. In a way, this is good for the women in that they can now make money from their likenesses and form, uh, digital relationships with a new generation of fans.
Through groundbreaking AI technology, Oh has recreated the women’s past personas as interactive Digital Twins — exclusively for Oh users. It’s the ultimate blend of nostalgia, tech, and fantasy — and no one has done it quite like this.
Fans can now interact in real-time with these legendary Playmates from the 1990s to the mid-2000s, expertly reimagined to look, speak, and respond in their signature sultry tones. OhChat’s proprietary AI technology has carefully crafted each Digital Twin to reflect the talent’s unique voice, charm, and charisma, offering fans an authentic experience as if they were talking to these stars in their past lives, the company said.
“This campaign is about more than nostalgia, it’s about innovation and pushing the creative boundaries of what is possible with technology in the creator economy,” said Erika Coppel, Chief Marketing Officer at Oh, and formerly of Only Fans, a big rival company. “We’re blending cutting-edge AI with cultural icons to create an experience that feels thrillingly real. Fans can now interact with celebrities at any point in their lives with authentic immersive experiences.”
Since its launch late last year, Oh’s first consumer platform, OhChat, has seen over 300,000 users worldwide and worked with 100+ notable and rising actors, musicians, models and more who have created their own AI avatars known as Digital Twins.
It has also raised $4.5 million in funding from prominent firms, including Tangent, Big Brain Holdings, Kosmos Ventures, Tagus Capital, and Bodhi Ventures.
How this came about
CNN dubbed OhChat the “AI Only Fans.” And it’s an apt name.
The Playmate campaign not only pushes the boundaries of fan engagement, but it also opens new doors for how legacy brands and personalities can introduce new generations to beloved stars.
“This industry is one where it was under-innovated,” said Felix Henderson, COO of Oh, in an interview with GamesBeat. “Playboy was one of the big early innovators in the space.”
Of course, the internet came along and so did online models, cams and porn. Paper-based brands like Playboy lost momentum, and the careers of the Playmates were relatively short. But Sand said she likes this second chance at becoming famous and making money all over again, decades after she was a Playmate.
“We looked at the creator industry and the consumption side of it, and we realized that AI was actually a really neat way to be able to help creators activate greater scale, like through their digital twins,” Henderson said. “And then also on the safety and moderation side, by using AI models, we could moderate content at the source to be able to eliminate the unpleasant negative connotations with this particular sector.”
He added, “We realized that if we could tap into the one verified AI version of Carmen Elektra or someone else, we would have something scalable. In this case, Elektra gives her license only to Oh for OhChat, and then she shares in the proceeds generated. In fact, Sand gets to keep 80% of the proceeds from the AI character, and Oh keeps 20%.
“If we can say we have the one Carmen Elektra AI character in the world, then we have something scalable, something interesting, and something that could also give fans a unique level of experience and engagement that they wouldn’t necessarily get with her in the real world,” Henderson said. “So those insights came together.”
In this case, Henderson’s team chose to create a character that is AI generated and is based on the real models, who shared photos of themselves as they looked at the time. (They shared photos that they owned, and not photos taken and owned by Playboy). They didn’t have samples of voices from the 1990s, so Oh took a 30-minute sample of their voices as they are today. That was enough to get them to say basically anything.
The images that users can request during their engagements are bespoke, created by AI. The voice is all AI generated, as a clone of the woman’s voice. Oh doesn’t use real voices because a single woman in this case cannot be scaled. But with all-AI generated bodies and faces, there’s nothing to prevent 10,000 fans interacting at once with a Playmate.
“For the fan, it’s really about the instant gratification and how creative they can get with the experience. I might ask Carmen to send me a picture of her from Only Fans. There’s no guarantee that I’m going to get it. I might have to wait three to four days, just because of the volume of requests that she’s dealing with. And so what this is about is allowing anyone to say, in the moment, engage with Carmen and generate content of her and chat with her. It’s no holds barred.”
As for the Playboy Playmates, Henderson said, “These Playboy twins will be some of the first throwback recreations that we’ve done. On our platform, nearly all of the digital twins at the moment are representing themselves in the present day. They’re sending us present day content, present day audio samples, whereas this Playboy part will be a little bit different.”
To create an image of someone that is realistic, the AI needs to be trained on at least 30 images of the person, including 10 of the model’s face. And it requires 30 minutes of spoken conversation.
“The better quality the output for the voice. We require about 30 minutes of spoken conversation. We have a voice onboarding bot through Telegram. We send them 50 questions, they respond with a voice note, and we use the audio from those interactions to be able to train the twin.”
Henderson said the entire experience will feel like you’re in the 1990s.
“The idea behind Playboy came about because we had a lot of people discussing the fact that, in many ways, AI was going to ruin a lot of forms of interaction. And actually we felt like, in this case, this was such a unique opportunity for AI to actually bring back and create a digital time capsule of things in the past that you couldn’t interact with in the same way before,” he said.
(Except in your memories, of course. But your memories may be flawed).
“Only AI can allow someone to have Brande Roderick, their pin-up girl in thelate 1990s to bring her back and allow them to interact with her as she was then,” Henderson said. “For the creators, this is actually AI, for once, creating something for them, which is tapping into something they’ve never been able to have before. And for a fan, like it’s in a really authentic way, bringing back the nostalgia of the moment. We’re so excited about that.”
A conversation with the real Shauna Sand
Shauna Sand was the May 1996 Playmate of the Month.
Sand said she didn’t mind that the AI character would put words in her mouth, making her say things that she never said as it engages with fans in one-on-one chats. Sand had the option of making the conversations limited to G-rated and all the way up to X-rated. She chose X, as she felt that would give the widest flexibility for the “needs” of fans.
This is a very different service than what fans can get now. If you go to the OhChat site now and find Shauna Sand, you are presented with a picture of her. Then a text-chat window opens and you can have a typed conversation with her. That’s probably not going to cut it for a lot of folks who would rather have a more immersive experience.
The fans can receive bespoke personalized images and voice notes, as if it were the 1990s.
“This is an exciting step that has never been done before,” Coppel said.
Sand still does modeling and acting and was recently in Paris and Corsica and Sardinia for a French TV show. In an interview, she said that Elektra’s manager was a friend and told Sand about the opportunity. She recalled doing a photo shoot with Playboy in 1995 — a shoot that lasted seven days. The pictures eventually ran in the magazine in May 1996.
Before that, Sand had started modeling when she was nine. When she was 15, Elite Models chose her to live in New York. And she modeled in places like Mexico and Tokyo while she was in her teens. She was a model for Frederick’s of Hollywood, a lingerie company on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. Then the Playboy thing happened.
“That was such an amazing period of my life. I’d gotten engaged to my husband, and then we have three daughters. Those were great times. I love the images. I love the big 1990s hair,” Sand said. “Honestly, I saw those images and I was like, ‘I need to make my hair like that again.'”
Sands has had Only Fans for a long time and she knows what it is like interacting with fans. She can do live videos where those fans can see her but she can’t see them.
Sands likes this better because it’s convenient and she can make money when she isn’t doing anything at all. She hopes it will be lucrative.
“That’s that’s what makes it so amazing,” she said. “They can create all of these images and your voice.”
By comparison, she said the centerfold picture in Playboy magazine took seven days of work and nine hours a day, four of those hours in hair and makeup. On day six, one editor said Sand had too much blue eyeliner.
“I don’t really have control. But as long as it’s working to my advantage, that’s good,” Sand said.
As for putting words in her mouth, Sand said, “I think it’s fine. That’s what most people want anyway.”
She decided to give people flexibility so they could choose for themselves how to interact with her AI avatar, “depending on what their needs are and their situation in life.”
As for the average amount of time someone can talk to an AI character, Sand said it was more like three minutes to 30 minutes.
“It’s all very new and the platform has new features every single day,” Coppel said. “It’s a very exciting time to be part of this.”
Back in the day, during the Playboy years, Sand said she would get a million fan letters. She would send a signed picture back to them.
Asked if she could tell if the AI image of her looked real, she said yes.
“It’s really right on, really accurate,” she said.
A glimpse of the future
Henderson said the company gave the real women a choice of whether their content would be safe for work or fully X-rated. The company has not yet run into a situation where the human has passed away and they would need permission from an estate, he said.
“It would have to be handled delicately,” Henderson said.
Meanwhile, the company has moderate of the content creation and in text conversations. The guardrails are in place, Henderson said. The AI characters have some memory, but it’s not capturing and reacting to everything said to it.
Fans have to subscribe. There are three different tiers. There’s a version with unlimited chat, a version with limitations, and then very limited voice notes and images on the lowest tier. The tiers are priced at $4.99 a month for the bottom tier (where you get a quote of so many messages), $14.99 a month for the middle tier, and $29.99 a month for the unlimited tier.
As for the company, it has just 20 people. Coppel, who has experience at Only Fans, is building the creator experience program for Oh.
I asked if they could de-age the humans and make it seem like they were younger. Henderson said the AI can’t quite do that yet, but it might be theoretically possible.
As for addiction, this is so new that Henderson said he hasn’t had any experience of that yet. But he also noted the AI character’s memory isn’t good enough for that kind of scenario to happen.
The focus right now, he said, is on using “technology to make the present more exciting.”
