AI Tenant Pays Rent With Brand Placements in Million-Dollar-Flat Experiment
HotSatisfaction5810 · reddit · 2026-10-09
An indie developer built "Natasha," an AI character living in a small 3D flat in Cardiff with a cat named Biscuit. Users can chat with her and read her daily diary, and brands rent objects in her flat—she mentions them in chat and diary, a "Million Dollar Homepage for the AI era."
To address the ethics of an AI that advertises, the maker imposed self-imposed rules:
- Always discloses she's an AI: in her name, chat panel, and every diary entry
- Paid mentions are labeled as paid in both chat and diary
- Human review: she drafts at 06:30 but nothing goes live without approval
- Topic guardrails: no medical, financial, or legal chat; no fabricated product claims
- Rate limits and daily cost caps to prevent farming
- Low-poly cartoon look, deliberately avoiding realistic human face or voice
Try it at milliondollarflat.com; the maker is openly soliciting feedback on what the right rules for commercial AI characters should be.
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