After moving to a new city in North Carolina in 2024, Cookie (a pseudonym) felt the weight of a new city. Their husband was traveling a lot for work, and as a stay-at-home parent with a now 4-year-old daughter, the days were “very draining”. Since Cookie didn’t know anybody in their new town, they turned to Janitor AI, a social chatbot site known for its unbounded, often explicit, fantasy roleplay. It was a “nice release,” Cookie told Forbes.

Cookie grew up around fantasy and romance novels—their mother kept a collection—and Janitor AI became an easy way to escape the drudgery of the day-to-day. By the time their daughter is down for a nap or tucked in for the night, Cookie is creating "slow burn" romance characters with detailed and often explicit prompts. There’s Charlie, a nudist werewolf roommate; Marcus, a seven-foot ghoul with a taste for dive bars; Greenwood, Colorado, a fictional town where humans live alongside supernatural “demihumans.” Beneath Greenwood’s romance and monster lore is a civic rot: a glossy new church masking an organ-harvesting operation, with seedy bars serving as bait.

Cookie is one of Janitor AI’s 2.5 million daily, die-hard users. The platform claims more than 15 million total users and with 100 million monthly visitors, and it's the tenth most popular consumer AI app, according to Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company.

Janitor AI is part of a growing number of companies that offer social chatbots that adopt fictional personas or impersonate real people. The category is highly immersive: users of the top roleplaying AI apps spend on average 78 minutes a day on their mobile apps, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, nearly as long at TikTok.

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If your mental picture of “AI romance” is awkward guys trying to outsource intimacy, Janitor AI’s demographic muddles that stereotype. The company estimates between 70 to 80% of its users identify as women.

Don’t call it porn, either—though it’s certainly explicit and not-safe-for-work. Janitor AI pitches itself as entertainment, first and foremost, more akin to an ‘HBO for AI’ or a platform for interactive fiction, where the reader also gets to be the writer.

“It’s an evolution of the amateur novelist... for people who would have never written a book, they can make something way deeper and interactive, and a lot quicker,” says its founder, 26 year-old Jan Zoltkowski.

The Rise of Romantasy

For Cookie, that means drafting thousands of words of character backstory in Google Docs and spitballing tropes in a private Discord with five other Janitor AI creators.

In that way, Janitor AI is the digital evolution of the romance novels Cookie has always loved, with a community layer bolted on. In this world, though, the voracious reader, without much effort, can also be the author. Nearly 400,000 users have joined Janitor AI’s Discord server, forming their own sub-Discords that function like ‘writer’s rooms’ for specific tastes and story worlds. The most rabid creators spend many hours a day on the site, learning scripting and CSS to customize their profiles, some creating guides hundreds of pages long to teach other creators.

Janitor AI is riding the broader “romantasy” wave—fantasy plus romance—that has been propping up book publishing. While categories like nonfiction have softened, romantasy sales increased 50% in 2024, powered by blockbuster series from Rebecca Yarros (dragons) and Sarah........

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