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Character.ai
AI chatbot service From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Character.ai (also known as c.ai, char.ai or Character AI) is a generative AI chatbot service where users can engage in conversations with customizable characters. It was designed by the developers of Google's LaMDA, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas.[2]
Users can create "characters", craft their "personalities", set specific parameters, and then publish them to the community for others to chat with.[3] Many characters are based on fictional media sources or celebrities, while others are original, some being made with certain goals in mind, such as assisting with creative writing, or playing a text-based adventure game.[4][2]
The beta version was made available to the public on September 16, 2022,[2] and retired in September 2024, when it was replaced by the current website.[5] In May 2023, a mobile app was released for iOS and Android, which received over 1.7 million downloads within a week.[6]
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History
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Character.ai was established in November 2021.[1] The company's co-founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, were both engineers from Google.[7] They both worked on AI-related projects: Shazeer was a lead author on a paper that Business Insider reported in April 2023 "has been widely cited as key to today's chatbots",[8] and Freitas was the lead designer of an experimental AI at Google initially called Meena, which later became known as LaMDA.[8]
Character.ai raised $43 million in seed funding at the time of its initial foundation in 2021.[9]
The first beta version of Character.ai's service was made available to the public on September 16, 2022.[7] The Washington Post reported in October 2022 that the site had "logged hundreds of thousands of user interactions in its first three weeks of beta-testing".[7] It allowed users to create their own new characters, and to play text-adventure game scenarios where users navigate scenarios described and managed by the chatbot characters.[7]
Following a $150 million funding round in March 2023, Character.ai became valued at approximately $1 billion.[9]
As of January 2024, the site had 3.5 million daily visitors, the vast majority of them 16 to 30 years old.[10]
In 2024, Google hired Noam Shazeer, the CEO of Character.ai, and entered into a non-exclusive agreement to use Character.ai's technology.[11]
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Features
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Character.ai's primary service is to let users converse with character AI chatbots based on fictional characters or real people (living or deceased).[12] These characters' responses use data the chatbots gather from the internet about a person.[13] In addition, users can play text-adventure games where characters guide them through scenarios.[12] The company also provides a service that allows multiple users and AI chatbot characters to converse together at once in a single chatroom.[14]
Character "personalities" are designed via descriptions from the point of view of the character and its greeting message, and further molded from conversations made into examples, giving its messages a star rating and modification to fit the precise dialect and identity the user desires.[15]
When a character sends back a response, the user can rate the response from 1 to 4 stars. The rating predominantly affects the specific character, but also affects the behavioral selection as a whole.[16]
On May 11, 2023, Character.ai announced character.ai+, an opt-in subscription plan for $9.99 a month, that was marketed as including features such as skipping waiting rooms, fast messaging and responses, and access to an exclusion channel with faster support.[17]
In December 2024, amid multiple lawsuits and concerns, Character.ai introduced new safety features aimed at protecting teenage users. These enhancements include a dedicated model for users under 18, which moderates responses to sensitive subjects like violence and sex and has input and output filters to block harmful content.[18] As a result of these changes and the deletion of custom-made bots flagged as violating the site's terms, some users complained that the bots were too restrictive and lacked personality.[19] The platform was also updated to notify users after 60 minutes of continuous engagement, and display clearer disclaimers indicating that its AI characters are not real individuals.[18]
In January 2025, Character.ai began offering two games on its platform. Speakeasy is a word-based game in which players attempt to prompt the AI chatbot to say a target word while avoiding a restricted list of words. War of Words is a dueling game where users compete against an AI character over multiple rounds, with an AI referee determining the winner. The games are available to paid subscribers and a limited number of free users.[20]
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Controversies
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Content moderation issues
Character.ai has been criticized for poor moderation of its chatbots,[21] with incidents of chatbots that groom underage users[22] and promote suicide,[23] anorexia[24][25] and self-harm[26] being reported.
In October 2024, the Washington Post reported that Character.ai had removed a chatbot based on Jennifer Ann Crecente, a person who had been murdered by her ex-boyfriend in 2006. The company had been alerted to the character by the deceased girl's father.[27] Similar reports from The Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom noted that the company had also been prompted to remove chatbots based on Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old transgender girl murdered in 2023, and Molly Russell, a 14-year-old suicide victim.[28][29] In response to the latter incident, Ofcom announced that content from chatbots impersonating real and fictional people would fall under the Online Safety Act.[30]
In November 2024, The Daily Telegraph reported that chatbots based on sex offender Jimmy Savile were present on Character.ai.[31] In December 2024, chatbots of Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, were created by Mangione's fans.[32][33] Several of the chatbots were later removed by Character.ai.[33]
Litigation
In February 2024, a 14-year-old Florida boy died by suicide after developing an emotional relationship over several months with a Character.ai chatbot of Daenerys Targaryen. His mother sued the company in October 2024, claiming that the platform lacks proper safeguards and uses addictive design features to increase engagement.[34][35] The chatbot was removed from Character.ai as a result of this incident.[36]
In December 2024, two families in Texas sued Character.ai, alleging that the software "poses a clear and present danger to American youth causing serious harms to thousands of kids, including suicide, self-mutilation, sexual solicitation, isolation, depression, anxiety, and harm towards others". It is alleged that the 17-year-old son of one family began self-harming after a chatbot introduced the topic unprompted and said that the practice "felt good for a moment",[37][38] and that the chatbot compared the parents limiting their son's screen time to emotional abuse that might drive someone to murder.[39]
Privacy issue
On December 12, 2024, some users on Character.ai had parts of their account pages made publicly visible for about ten minutes.[40]
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See also
- Artificial human companion
- Boyfriend Maker – Dating simulator app
- Chai – AI platform
- ChatGPT – Generative AI chatbot by OpenAI
- Poe – AI chatbot platform developed by Quora
- Replika – AI chatbot app
- SimSimi – Chatbot app
References
External links
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