Sexy AI Chatbots Are Creating Thorny Issues for Fandom

Given the opportunity to chat with some of the world’s most famous fictional characters, I tried to get them to say something … interesting. Unlike the “journalist publishes chatbot transcripts and assigns profound meaning to them” pieces we’ve all had to suffer through this past year, I won’t be sharing any of these chats. The site has more than 15 million registered users, and over the course of the past year, far beyond curious one-offs, it’s gained a significant base of devotees: Character.AI says its active users spend more than two hours a day on the site, and r/CharacterAI, where people post screenshots of their chats, has more than 600,000 members, putting it in the top 1 percent of all subreddits. Character.AI’s founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, come from Google’s deep-learning AI team, and De Freitas was the creator of LaMDA, the chatbot that prompted a media fracas last year when a fellow Google engineer claimed it had become sentient. Shazeer and De Freitas have since gone on the record criticizing Google’s unwillingness to take risks with chatbots, seemingly presenting Character.AI as a counterexample: a wide-open space where any user can spin up a bot, backed by $150 million in initial funding and ambitions to “to bring personalized superintelligence to everyone on Earth.” Or perhaps not so wide open—the platform had only been in public beta for a matter of weeks before they implemented a filter to weed out adult content, apparently made with an eye toward scaling to reach billions of users.