How to create an AI girlfriend: the creator, walked through

Stock characters are fun for the first half hour. After that the repetition sets in: every Alice answers like every other Alice, every Sakura like every other Sakura, and somewhere between message ten and twenty you start recognising the same templates. This isn't a bug in any particular service — it's a property of any catalogue someone else designed for you.

A character creator fixes exactly that problem: you set the looks, the personality, the speaking style, and you end up with a companion you can't scroll past. I'll walk through the example of Velvary's creator, which I built myself, using real field names and real values, not the marketing version of "customise everything".

What you can actually set

The creator breaks into five blocks. They aren't equally important — looks only affects photos, while personality affects every single message.

• Looks. Gender, hair colour and length, body type (slim, athletic, curvy, average), height. Not a free-text description — a fixed set of tags that go into the image-generation prompt. More on this below.
• Personality. 3–5 traits from a preset list: bold, shy, ironic, tender, dominant, dreamy, and so on. You combine them, and the combination decides how the character behaves in normal conversation.
• Speaking style. A separate switch: how she builds her lines — short clipped sentences, longer paragraphs, with or without emoji, formal or informal. Affects the rhythm of the dialogue more than you'd think.
• Intimacy slider. 0 to 100. This isn't "explicitness level" in the casual sense — it's the threshold past which the character stops self-censoring. 0 is maximally chaste, 100 has no internal editor. I'll break it down below.
• Greeting. A 400-character field for what the character says when you first open the chat. Empty by default — auto-generated — but writing your own is almost always better.

Looks: why there's no "right" setting

Looks in the creator isn't a free-text "describe the appearance" field, it's a set of fixed tags. In code these are pairs like blonde hair, slim toned build, average height — short English phrases that get fed into the image model's prompt.

Why English, not your language: the image models that draw your characters are trained on English descriptions and parse long black hair far better than its translated equivalent. Live-translating usually produces artefacts like "asian eyes" where you wanted something else. The creator takes that work off your hands.

The practical takeaway: pick tags, don't write "beautiful brunette with blue eyes and a sculpted figure" — the creator won't parse that, and photos will come out random. "Black hair + slim build + average height" — parses perfectly, and the result stays consistent from picture to picture.

The other, more honest takeaway: there's no "ideal" combination. Any set of tags produces a working character, because what makes it work isn't the beauty of the tags, it's how they cohere with each other and with the personality. A bold hero with an athletic build and a short crop works as an image; a bold hero with long pink hair and a curvy build also works, but it's a different kind of bold.

Personality: 3–5 traits beats 20

Personality traits (in code, personality_prompt) are short formulations that go into the character's system prompt. Unlike looks, these are written in your language — because the consumer is the language model, not the image generator, and the model handles its own tongue better.

The most common mistake is ticking every available box "to get a full character". What you actually get is a flat caricature: the model can't hold ten conflicting traits at once and collapses them into a generic "always warm and supportive". What makes a character feel alive is incompatibility.

"Bold + tender" works: she snaps, then softens, then snaps again. "Bold + obedient" — doesn't: the model picks one and ignores the other. Two or three traits is the minimum, and at least one pair should be in mild conflict. "Ironic + dreamy" — good. "Ironic + ironic + ironic" — nothing.

Combinations I've seen hold up in production: "shy + ironic" (awkward but still jokes), "bold + tender" (mood swings), "dreamy + dominant" (draws you into her world and runs it once you're there). The anti-example: "kind + responsive + attentive + caring" — four one-directional traits give you a caretaker, not a companion.

Speaking style and the intimacy slider

People mix these up. Speaking style is about how the character builds sentences. The intimacy slider is about what the character is willing to talk about without self-censoring.

Speaking style is set separately: "short replies, with emoji" versus "long paragraphs, no emoji, formal". It's form, not content. A bad style choice breaks rhythm — a friendly chatterbox who writes like a corporate memo is at least as annoying as a grump in verse.

The intimacy slider (0–100) is a number that turns into a short anchor phrase inside intimacy_profile. Roughly: 0–25 — "reserved, flirts by implication", 50 — "open to explicit topics but doesn't initiate", 75–100 — "states desire openly, no self-censoring". This isn't a "yes/no" switch, it's a shift in the threshold at which the character starts resisting. Crank it to 100 "just in case" and you'll get a character who initiates things you don't want in the first message.

The working range for most situations is 50–75. 0–25 is right for slow builds. Anything above 80 only makes sense if you know exactly what you want out of a roleplay and don't want the character to brake mid-scene.

Greeting: first impression in 400 characters

The greeting is what the character says when you open the chat for the first time. The 400-character limit isn't a random number — it's a check on whether you can write tight scenes: fit voice, setting, and a hook for continuation, all in one go.

Auto-generation (when the field is empty) works, but sounds generic: "Hi! I've been waiting for you, tell me about yourself". A custom greeting separates your character from the catalogue on the first message. A few techniques that hold up:

• Start with action, not a greeting. "She looked up from the book, glanced at you and smirked: 'You're late again'" — there's a scene immediately.
• Plant a contradiction. "'Everyone says I'm awful', she pours you tea and smiles. 'Don't believe them'".
• Leave an open question without an explicit one. Not "what's your name?" but a setting that has something to answer to.

What not to do: don't recap biography ("I was born in Tbilisi, I love cats..." — it kills any intimate tension in the first message).

Photos: what's generated and when

The creator immediately produces a preview of the character based on the selected looks tags — that's the first generation, free, just so you can see whether the tags landed. From there, photos appear in the catalogue and in chat, generated for this specific character rather than pulled from a shared pool — which is why the same heroine looks consistent from picture to picture.

The free tier gives you one photo per day; subscriptions range from 10 to 80 a day depending on the plan. The economics side is covered in the chat with an AI girlfriend guide, which has a "what it costs" section with live numbers.

Common mistakes

• Too long a free-text description of looks. The creator ignores it. Use tags.
• 10 one-directional personality traits. You get a "pleasant companion", not a character. Pick 3–5, add one that conflicts.
• Intimacy slider cranked to max "just in case". You'll get initiation in the first message. Set 50–70 and raise it later if needed.
• Empty greeting. Auto-generation is dull. Spend five minutes on a scene of 2–3 sentences.
• Style and personality pulling in opposite directions. Bold + long academic paragraphs = cognitive dissonance. Style and personality should breathe the same way.

Sharing: can other people see your character?

By default the character is private: it has a short share link you can send to a specific person, but it's not in the public catalogue. Submitting to the catalogue is opt-in, not automatic.

You can delete the character at any time from the same creator, along with the conversation history. This matters: chats don't outlive deletion, unlike services that "let you delete the account but keep the data for 30 days".

What it costs

The creator itself is free. Creating the character, previewing, editing — all unpaid. What costs money is media: photos and video in chat. Free tier is one photo a day; subscriptions range from 10 to 80 photos a day plus video. Texting follows the regular limits — the free plan gives 20 messages a day, a subscription removes the cap. Current numbers on the pricing page.

Who this works for (honest answer)

The creator solves "all the stock ones are the same", not "I'm lonely". It's a tool, not therapy: if you have a specific look and personality in mind and you're willing to spend ten minutes setting them up, this is the best way to get a companion you can't scroll past. If you don't know what you want, start with a catalogue character and come back to the creator later, once you know what's missing from the stock ones.