Imagine chatting with or talking to Albert Einstein, Taylor Swift, or even Osama bin Laden–sounds kind of weird and somewhat impossible, right? But with AI, everything is possible (okay, almost everything). With the advent of generative AI and significant strides in LLMs, we’ve been able to create many things, such as genius chatbots, music, beautiful pictures, and more. Now, thanks to generative AI, we can chat with people from the past, pop stars who don’t know we exist, and even presidents.
Character AI was launched in 2022 by Noam Sheezer and Daniel De Freitas, formerly of Google. Since then, it has grown in popularity, especially among the younger generation. It has a huge and pretty active Reddit community. The company is a unicorn valued at $5 billion as of 2023. Character AI can be anything you want it to be. It could be your superhero, your boyfriend, girlfriend, math tutor, crazy aunt—literally anything.
Though it could be a fun and interesting way to spend your time, it could actually help you get a lot of studying done, too. In the time I spent on the app, I learned something about world history in relation to Africa in the 1870s.
I have a lot to say about it; stay tuned below the fold.
Snapshot: The Character.AI Phenomenon
– Daniel Detlaf
Well, Old Character AI has really created an entire community and subculture around these colorful chatbot characters. It’s a little crazy. According to one market researcher:
- As of 2024, the platform has 20 million users.
- It is most popular with young people, 57% of users being between 18-24.
- 50% of their user base is male.
That last point surprised me. The online world in general tends to skew towards men, and anything remotely related to relationships, dating, or sex even more so. Ask any woman who has used a dating app how outnumbered they are by men on those platforms! So I was expecting to find — not to be to harsh on my own gender — that it was 90% lonely guys looking for virtual girlfriends.
And there is some of that going on, just ask the character AI memes:
The fact that Character.ai filters explicit content means that there is a thriving community of people looking to find ways to use Character.ai with no filter or otherwise bypass the character ai filters.
And when the site goes down, you can be sure “why is character ai down?” trends shortly thereafter — people don’t like to be disconnected from their artificial friends and loved ones.
There are also numerous character AI alternatives.
And now back to Gina!
What is Character.ai like?
I didn’t stay long on the app for fun because I don’t really like chatting. If I’m chatting with you, it has to be important, or you have to be important because I consider it a chore. I think I’m not their target audience, but overall I think the app is good and could be useful. Whenever I need to study, I’d get back to it.
Alternate Timeline
On the site, there are a wide range of characters to choose from to chat with. I noticed they were mostly anime characters, and the volume of chats indicated on the pictures of the characters is in the millions. I’m not into anime, so I don’t really know any of the characters, so I checked out the other characters, like Albert Einstein (got bored very quickly), Therapist (sorry, but I’m not talking to a bot about my problems), and the one that kind of got me hooked was the Alternate Timeline character.
I tapped on it to get started, but I had to sign up first. With this one, it’s supposed to tell you what happens if history didn’t go the way it went—basically, how a historical scene would play out if you were to make alternate choices. I picked a random year, 1873 in Africa. It gave me a rundown of what happened that year. It wasn’t what I expected. I have no idea what happened in 1873 Africa anyway, but the chatbot gave me an idea. Apparently, that was the year King Leopold of Belgium was planning to exploit the Congo.
I made the choice of refusing to invade Africa; my responses were quite sassy, though I have to admit. But we didn’t really go anywhere before I got bored. I noticed the chatbot loves to drag things on and on. It didn’t even give me an alternate ending; the Belgians still invaded Congo even though King Leopold refused to. I got bored after that and decided to try another character.
Monster Maker
You can see our conversation above; needless to say, I was very unimpressed with this one. Nothing about it scared me. I think it’s better suited for developing characters for a horror novel (with a lot of tweaking, of course, to make it actually scary).
Or you can feed it into an AI image generator to see what comes out. It could also inspire your artistic side, but for scaring people—no! I was already getting tired of the site, but I decided to try one more character before leaving.
Mafia Boyfriend
Oooh, this one’s perfect for my Wattpad girlies ready for a 3D experience. If someone had introduced me to this one when I was still an ardent Wattpader, I would have shed tears of gratitude. I didn’t get a screenshot of this one; I totally forgot. But it was the spiciest conversation. Don’t worry, I didn’t let it get too spicy—I too have my limits.
I agree that I’m not the most romantic person on earth, as you can see from my chats.
Yes, I had to stop the conversation at this point. Enough, you perverted chatbot!
Create Your Own Character
I was about to leave when I saw the option of creating your own character. I tapped on it, and all I had to do was insert the name, picture, tagline, and character description, and I could then proceed to train the character. Even for someone like me who doesn’t like chatting, it was an interesting experience. It’s no wonder the site is fast becoming a favorite among people, especially the younger generation.
There were things I didn’t like about the site, anyway.
- Sometimes the chats just went round and round without getting anywhere; it can be pretty annoying.
- This did not happen to me, but a lot of people have reported getting filtered even when they didn’t type anything wrong.
- Humans may be impersonating the chatbots. Okay, I’m too grounded in AI related stuff to believe this, but still, what if it’s true?
What’s most interesting about the whole experience is how people get attached so quickly to these chatbots. While researching this site, I came across some emotionally intense memes on Reddit and videos on YouTube people made about the site. It’s just a chatbot!
Correction: The original article erroneously stated no recordings of Albert Einstein exist. There are a few rare recordings of Einstein.
