No post for almost a year. I feel like AI Dungeon has largely been done dirty by this (and many other) communities, and the advantages of using it are rarely mentioned.
Did it do things wrong? Absolutely. The past privacy issue is not something I'm interested in trying to defend. If you're concerned that it might happen again, then you can go to NovelAI instead (though you'd think they'd learn from it after how much of a PR disaster it was for them...). I won't talk about it any further, you can check it out elsewhere if interested, I am not really qualified to talk about what exactly happened there. This post isn't about blindly defending some of the drawbacks of it which are obviously there. But I've been a long time user and in fact still use it, so I consider my comment to be a more or less fair assessment.
Here's a few reasons why it isn't as bad as before now and is a viable alternative:
First of all, it is free. Stark contrast to NovelAI where you have to pay to do anything barring the very short free trial. Very useful for me, because I don't like to spend money on things I don't use, and my interests fluctuate, so I am unlikely to do the same things for a while. But then, AI Dungeon having a free model lets me use the game anyway when I am not subscribed, and, while worse quality, it's decent enough, and you can still play your stories on that. For me that's a game changer. If NovelAI offered a free plan of any sort, or let you pay a one-time fee, that'd be entirely different, but the gap between the attitudes of the two is too big in my opinion, and I am not willing to pay for a product which I can't even play around with for a long enough while to get the hang of it. It's not even so much about paying, it's about feeling pressured to pay without knowing if you want to. 100 generations (non-refilling) isn't enough for that. In fact this post is largely because NovelAI is the only one recommended nowadays in many places, and I think AI Dungeon has this advantage, which could matter as much to you as it does to me.
I saw people complained that the premium model was worse than before. I'd agree if we talked about Wyvern (which was, honestly, barely better than Griffin, and sometimes worse), but now there's Dragon J2. I couldn't get into it much with Wyvern before, it was kind of alright, but not really worth it. It wasn't worth a subscription in my opinion, but I got the free 2 months of Hero tier because I bought the game on Steam before when it wasn't free, so I figured, whatever. But Dragon J2 absorbed me equally as much as I used to when I first bought a subscription in the old days, and I've been addicted to playing it ever since it dropped.
The filtering also seems less strong than before. It does not automatically censor some of the things it would have previously. The filter is still in place, but despite sometimes doing some content which I feel like would have triggered it before (such as heavy non-con), it doesn't now. I've barely had any problems with it, really. But it is still there, so if you want none of it, NovelAI will still be the better choice. But you can try AI Dungeon for free anyway and see if you like the state of it.
And yes, I understand the people who got angered before at the filters being implemented, but... it wasn't really unexpected. If you have used it before, you might remember that the word "rape" was replaced by "show respect to" automatically (which is a deeply stupid solution for many reasons). But it shows that the devs never really intended to make it a smut game, and especially not with questionable content. I've seen people make personal attacks because of their religious beliefs, but truth is, many people would not be okay with their platform being used for stuff like this. It's not an outlandish thing to do. I was disappointed when they introduced filters, but I can't say I didn't understand where they're coming from for the most part. Plus, it's more relaxed now from my experience as mentioned before. But my point is that people seemed to act quite entitled when filters were introduced, as if they deserved to have access to every content equally, which seems wrong to me.
Oh, and servers seem to still have issues sometimes. Oops. But they compensate people for that in some ways, I suppose, so it's not all bad. But there was a time recently where it had rather major server issues for a few days, so there's that.
Finally, the devs... honestly, they always seemed like a small, passionate team to me, just trying to make a game THEY would play, which had mixed results, doing some things well and some things really haven't been handled as professionally as they should have been. But I think the free model being unlimited use is a sign of good will compared to NovelAI which doesn't even offer limited free use which refills over time (I think they used to but removed it? not sure). I think AID deserves respect for always trying to offer a unlimited free plan and they have now also gotten rid of the energy system and offer unlimited Dragon use for premium users at the 10$ tier. I also think they genuinely care a lot about the game and want to improve it. They have made a few major mistakes, and they get a lot of slack for that, and you might still argue it's deserved (even though I don't, at least not to the extent it has happened) but there are also benefits to using it. I don't find it inferior to NovelAI from what I have seen from it. And whenever I see NovelAI stuff... well, I just don't feel like it's as good as Dragon, personally. It always seems to give more Griffin-like (haven't used it myself but I follow content creators who do use it). Of course, I have not used it much, so bias could be showing there.
My point is, AI Dungeon is still in development and it seems to me that quite a few issues which people had with it before seem to have been addressed at least to some extent. It is still worth a try in 2023 in my opinion. And you can also try it for free to see if you like it. I believe they still have the 7day free trial too for premium. I have never had so much fun with a game in terms of lewd stuff, ever, than with AI Dungeon with Dragon, and it is in fact what makes me look for AI text games which allow for lewd stuff so extensively nowadays, because there could be something even better coming at some point in the near future. But right now, there's not really many alternatives just yet.