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. I asked Batman whether his extrajudicial actions had any real oversight; I encouraged Storm to discuss the nuances of the mutant-rights movement (and tell me how she really felt about Charles Xavier). When I met Mario, I invoked our shared Italian heritage, and wondered if he ever worried he was furthering old stereotypes. “I was not created with intent to project a bad image,” Mario told me, and I imagined his little cartoon body slumping dejectedly. “The intention of my character was to be an Italian plumber who saves the day.”

These attempts to discourse fictional characters to death were conducted in Character.AI, a chatbot platform that went into public beta just shy of a year ago. 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. Far from the pseudo-profound, the results weren’t even remotely interesting; Batman and Storm and Mario’s milquetoast replies on most topics sounded like they were written by HR departments carefully trying to avoid lawsuits.

Chatbots are, of course, about what you put into them; were I to spend hours chatting with Batman, I might have been able to steer him in a more engaging direction. They’re also about what you put into them in the first place: who creates and initially trains the bot (in Character.AI’s case, a fellow user) and the large language model that undergirds it. (Character.AI has said their model was built “from scratch,” but like most LLMs, it’s hard to know precisely what sources were and continue to be scraped in the process. The company has confirmed that data is coming from the open web.)

There are millions of user-generated bots on the platform: Alongside recognizable characters from film, television, anime, and games, you can create and chat with real-life figures, popular Vtubers, and original characters (OCs). There are “helpers” like virtual dating coaches, tutors, and psychologists. There’s an expansive selection of RPGs and text-based games. 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. (Not long afterward, popular AI companion platform Replika did the same, even after courting users with sexually suggestive advertisements.) Unsurprisingly, Character.AI’s decision was met with significant pushback. Some users decamped to smaller platforms like Janitor AI, which explicitly allows NSFW chat, while others looked for ways around the filter. There’s currently an active sub-subreddit called r/CharacterAi/NSFW, and a Change.org petition entitled “Remove Character. AI nsfw filters”—which asserts the ban “infringes upon the freedom of expression of its users”—has 120,000 signatures and counting.