Humalike's GTA NPCs remember every player and gossip about them. Each spoken line is a billed turn.

That line sits on Humalike's own launch panel, above two men standing outside a house in Los Santos with a small teal AI tag floating over each head 1. On September 27 the company put that panel on Product Hunt as its third launch, and the board showed it in second place, behind OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol and Luna 2.

The product is real and it is specific. Humalike adds AI characters to a FiveM server, the modding platform that hosts GTA V roleplay, and GTA BOOM reported its characters live on Strefa RP, Poland's biggest roleplay server, in early August 3. What the pitch calls a living city is, underneath, a hosted behaviour service with a meter on it, and the meter counts exactly one thing: a reply that a player heard.

Humalike is the trading name of Soofte, Inc., and it describes itself as behavioral infrastructure for humanlike AI, built around turn-taking, proactiveness, social dynamics, a memory of people, and event-driven awareness 4. The GTA product is one surface of that, alongside companions and home hardware.

On the game server, it arrives as a FiveM resource. The operator registers the server in a Humalike dashboard, adds the resource to the resources folder, and sets a license key as a server-only convar 5. That key is a secret: the docs instruct operators to use set and never setr, because a replicated convar would hand the license to every connected client, and they say not to configure voice URLs or voice secrets at all, since Humalike provisions voice from the license 6.

The requirements list is short: a current FXServer build with OneSync, a publicly reachable callback address on the server, a Humalike account and license, and a working microphone on any player who wants to talk back 7. The game server holds the bodies, the audio and the world. The conversation, the voices and the memory come from Humalike. The launch listing credits ElevenLabs and Deepgram, the voice and speech-recognition companies, among the services the product is built with 1.

Two kinds of character exist. A static one is a persistent body Humalike keeps at fixed coordinates, which suits a shopkeeper, an informant or a quest giver. An ambient one is dynamic: when players gather, the resource spawns a pedestrian of that character's model just out of sight and keeps the character on it while anyone is nearby 8. Both kinds share one conversation, memory, voice and action system 7.

Ambient mode takes the street. While it is on, clients switch GTA's own on-foot population off, and Humalike fills the rest of the pavement with persona-less extras drawn from ordinary civilian models, up to a per-cluster limit and a server-wide limit 8. Vehicles and traffic carry on as they always did.

The memory is what the marketing is selling, and the vendor describes it as person-centric: who someone is, what matters to them, what happened last time 4. Characters recognise players, build separate relationships with each of them, react to clothing, masks, weapons and gunfire around them, and decide what to reveal, what to hide and when to lie 9. Groups share knowledge, so a gang, an ambulance crew or a business holds a memory of its own, and the coverage of the deployment names one behaviour outright: gossip, the spread of word about what a player did, so that other characters know before the player arrives 3. The vendor's one-sentence summary of group memory is the line at the top of this piece 9.

The documentation offers one warning about how to hold all of this. Character identity and memory are stable; a GTA entity handle is not, and an integration should refer to the Humalike NPC id whenever it stores character state 8. The face standing on the pavement is disposable. The record is not.

Humalike bills the rest of its API in credits. The FiveM product is the exception: it has its own currency, and the currency is the turn 10.

"One delivered NPC reply is one turn," the billing page says. If players heard it, it counts, whether it answered a player, reacted to an event in the world, or was cut off after an audible start. One reply to a whole group is still one turn. Interjections are free, replies that were never delivered are free, listening to players is free, and so is world generation, which covers creating and editing worlds, groups and personas along with the background simulation 11.

Two plans exist. $79 a month buys 25,000 turns, and $119 buys 50,000. Every account opens with a free trial week: choose a plan, add a card, pay nothing today, and receive 1,000 trial turns for seven days. The first real charge lands after a week or the moment the trial turns run out, whichever comes first 11.

Auto-purchase is on by default once a card is on file, and the docs give the reason in one line: "a busy server that runs dry mid-evening is worse than a charge you expected." Run out on the $79 plan and Humalike charges the $40 difference, grants the 25,000-turn difference and moves the server up to the $119 plan. Run out on the $119 plan and it charges a one-time $50 top-up of 33,300 turns, at most three times per cycle 11.

Add it up and a server that fills up spends $119 plus as much as $150, for a ceiling of 149,900 delivered replies inside one monthly cycle. Paid turns accumulate across renewals, and each paid grant lives for a year 11.

The same page describes what happens when a balance reaches zero, and this is the sentence to read twice. The automatic muting "is not yet enforced," so an exhausted balance does not silence anyone yet 11. The meter has shipped. The switch that acts on it has not.

Humalike's own numbers for Strefa RP cover three weeks: 1,189 different players chatted with the characters, more than 250,000 turns of conversation passed between them, and the time the two sides spent together came to 34 days 9.

Those 250,000 replies over 21 days come to about 11,900 a day, or roughly 357,000 across a 30-day cycle. The top plan with every top-up it permits covers 149,900. The showcase wants about two and a half times the published ceiling.

Read "turns of conversation" the generous way, as counting both halves of every exchange, and the characters still spoke about 125,000 times over the three weeks, near 179,000 a month, which sits above 149,900.

Two readings fit. Strefa RP may run on commercial terms the price list does not carry, which is ordinary for a flagship deployment and is also the one thing a buyer cannot look up. Or the marketing count and the billing count measure differently. The documentation does not say which, and that gap is the first question for a sales conversation.

One row above has no fix in the price list. A roleplay server's characters build a record of every person they meet: the store is person-centric, it is shared inside a group, and it outlives the body that collected it 8. Humalike's privacy notice covers the operator's own account data. It describes nothing about what an operator tells a player, how long a record survives that player's last visit, or what a deletion request does to a faction's shared memory. The terms place the record with the customer 12. Nobody has said what happens to it.

The thing being sold is a city population that writes its own dialogue, and the company that owns the city has said it will not build one. Take-Two's chief executive Strauss Zelnick has said generative AI has "zero part" in what Rockstar is building, that the worlds are handcrafted down to every building and street, and that a machine making a game on GTA's level is "laughable" 14. Rockstar owns FiveM, having bought its maker Cfx.re 3. So the liveliest living-city experiment in Grand Theft Auto runs on the publisher's own modding platform, inside a fan server, written by someone else.

GTA BOOM, which reported the deployment, added its own caveat: a promotional showcase looks flawless in the trailer, and generative AI in live multiplayer tends to arrive with latency, odd responses and an uncanny quality when the mask slips 3.

Humalike ships real engineering. A character that holds its turn, notices a drawn weapon, recognises a player between sessions and carries what it learned into a faction's shared memory is harder work than most of what launches on a given day, and the panels leading with group memory describe something the documentation actually implements 89.

What an operator buys is narrower than a city. It is a hosted service sold by the delivered reply, with automatic top-ups on by default, a published ceiling that its own showcase appears to exceed, and a memory of every player that the operator's agreement hands over with everything else the characters generate 12.

So the fit is a private world, or a public server whose players already know the crowd is synthetic. Before switching ambient characters on in front of a thousand strangers, do three things: turn auto-purchase off, ask for the volume price Strefa RP is on, and ask for a written rule on how long the server keeps what a character remembers about a player. The characters will remember everything the room tells them. Someone at the operator still has to write down what the room is owed.