Character.ai

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.

Users can create "characters", craft their "personalities", set specific parameters, and then publish them to the community for others to chat with. 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.

The beta version was made available to the public on September 16, 2022, and retired in September 2024, when it was replaced by the current website. In May 2023, a mobile app was released for iOS and Android, which received over 1.7 million downloads within a week.

History

Character.ai was established in November 2021. The company's co-founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, were both engineers from Google. 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", and Freitas was the lead designer of an experimental AI at Google initially called Meena, which later became known as LaMDA.

Character.ai raised $43 million in seed funding at the time of its initial foundation in 2021.

The first beta version of Character.ai's service was made available to the public on September 16, 2022. 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". 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.

Following a $150 million funding round in March 2023, Character.ai became valued at approximately $1 billion.

As of January 2024, the site had 3.5 million daily visitors, the vast majority of them 16 to 30 years old.

In 2024, Google hired Noam Shazeer, the CEO of Character.ai, and entered into a non-exclusive agreement to use Character.ai's technology.

Features

Character.ai's primary service is to let users converse with character AI chatbots based on fictional characters or real people (living or deceased). These characters' responses use data the chatbots gather from the internet about a person. In addition, users can play text-adventure games where characters guide them through scenarios. The company also provides a service that allows multiple users and AI chatbot characters to converse together at once in a single chatroom.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

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.

Controversies

Content moderation issues

Character.ai has been criticized for poor moderation of its chatbots, with incidents of chatbots that groom underage users and promote suicide, anorexia and self-harm 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. 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. In response to the latter incident, Ofcom announced that content from chatbots impersonating real and fictional people would fall under the Online Safety Act.

In November 2024, ''The Daily Telegraph'' reported that chatbots based on sex offender Jimmy Savile were present on Character.ai. In December 2024, chatbots of Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, were created by Mangione's fans. Several of the chatbots were later removed by Character.ai.

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. The chatbot was removed from Character.ai as a result of this incident.

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".

Server

On December 12, 2024, some users on Character.ai had parts of their account pages made publicly visible for about ten minutes.

See also

* Artificial human companion
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* Poe – AI chatbot platform developed by Quora
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References

External links

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{{Generative AI chatbots

2022 software
Deep learning software applications
Online obscenity controversies
Internet-related controversies
Chatbots