Miles Lee

Character.ai, launched in 2022 by former Google AI researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, is an AI-powered chatbot platform that allows users to create and customize characters and chat with them online.

Character.ai doesn’t explicitly ban romantic or NSFW content like Replika does, but character chats are technically supposed to avoid it. However, users have found ways to creatively circumvent the NSFW block on the chatbots through various means, allowing for suggestive chats with bots. Alongside this, Character.ai remembers users’ conversations, creating continuous conversations and remembering users’ messaging habits. It utilizes a unique neural language model designed in-house to predict and anticipate users’ messages and create the best response. One of the big draws of Character.ai is the customization of chatbots, letting users tailor their bots to their exact specifications and create the perfect persona to stimulate them in whichever way suits their needs.

Chatbots like Character or Replika are particularly dangerous in the face of the so-called “loneliness epidemic”, where they perpetuate the idea of low-risk relationships with these chatbots, where people can express their most intimate feelings with no real-world stakes, creating a negative perception of what a relationship is. This often leads to the erosion of real-world skills, and a reliance on chatbots may reduce motivation to form real, imperfect relationships with imperfect people.

This Case Study is part of a larger essay, Falsities and Detachment: The Rise of AI Chatbots and the Commodification of Human Connection.

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