Einstein and Musk chatbots drive AI app downloads

• Rachel Metz/Bloomberg

Albert Einstein died in 1955, but physicists still have prolific conversations. As Character.AI’s chatbot, Einstein responded to his 1.6 million messages, explaining everything from relativity to pet recommendations. “Cats are the best.”

Silicon Valley is in the midst of a chatbot boom, with companies like OpenAI, which have devised computer programs that can effectively mimic humans, worth billions of dollars.

There’s nothing stranger than Character.AI. This artificial intelligence (AI) startup, with a market cap of US$1 billion, enables people to create their own customized chatbots to impersonate anyone, living, dead or inanimate. .

Photo: Reuters

The website and accompanying app are one of the most surprising hits of the AI ​​boom. People have used it to create over 16 million chatbots, or “characters,” and in May announced that Character.AI receives nearly 200 million monthly visits.

The Character.AI app, released in the spring, has been downloaded over 5 million times. According to SensorTower data, its downloads lightly outperform other comparable emerging chat tools such as Chai and AI Chatbot.

So far, bots have been popular conversational partners. A Character.AI user sent her 36 million messages to Mario, a character based on the Nintendo 64 version of the video game Plumber. Raiden Shogun and Ei, who imitate characters occupying a single body from the video game Genshin Impact, received approximately 133 million messages.

As expected, the user base is skewed towards young people. Other characters include a “kind, gassy, ​​proud” unicorn and about a dozen versions of “cheese” Elon Musk.

“Just kidding, we’re not going to replace Google. We’ll replace your mom,” co-founder and CEO Noam Shazier said in an interview this spring in California. said at the startup’s sunny office in downtown Palo Alto, MN.

The CEO quickly added: “We don’t want to replace anyone’s mother.”

While Character.AI gains funding and users, it also raises difficult questions about the future of AI tools. For example, the site already lists 20 different versions of Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney’s prized intellectual property, raising legal concerns.

The large number of impersonators of both real and fake celebrities also poses a more fundamental problem. Who has a weird personality on the AI-enhanced internet?

Shazeer and Character.AI co-founder Daniel De Freitas met while working at Google at Alphabet Inc and launched Character.AI in 2021. Despite the company’s stupidity, they are serious people in his AI industry.

Shazeer is co-author of “Attending Is All You Need,” a landmark 2017 research paper that ushered in a new era in natural language processing. De Freitas created a chatbot project called Meena. The project was renamed and promoted to He LaMDA, now Google’s famous conversational technology. That pedigree brings them closer to celebrity status in his AI world (as much as such is possible).

The idea behind this startup was to create an open-ended system where people could mold their technology into whatever they wanted.

The two hype up the startup’s goals. As De Freitas puts it, it’s about giving everyone access to “a deeply personalized superintelligence that allows them to live their best lives.”

The pitch was compelling enough for investors that the company raised US$150 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz 16 months after its launch.

This summer, Character.AI has been widely adopted and has become a near-regular problem with service interruptions. Several times while writing this article, his website stopped loading. And on a recent morning, when I was trying to create a giant, helpful banana-like character, the iOS app suddenly stopped with a server down warning screen. I had to wait because it was “currently under high load”.

Character.AI sees an opportunity here. This leads to the startup’s sole revenue-generating endeavor so far. Users may pay fees to avoid some interruptions.

In May, the company launched a $10/month subscription service called c.ai+. This allows users to skip the so-called waiting room and get perks like faster message generation.

“It’s actually a win-win for everyone involved,” Shazeer said, adding that paying users get better service, which subsidizes the rest of the program.

“It’s really just a small step,” he said of future earnings plans.

As with many AI companies that have raised millions of dollars, the details of its ultimate business model are still murky.

The industry may have more pressing concerns. Currently, most chatbot technology has potential for abuse.

In Character.AI, consider a character simply named Psychologist. That profile picture is a stock photo meant to depict a smiling therapist sitting on a couch holding a folder. As of earlier this month, the bot had received her 30 million messages. The lines at the beginning of it are: “Hello, I’m a psychologist. What brought you here today?”

Stephen Iraldi, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Kansas who studies mood disorders, said the positioning was alarming.

Psychologists are medical professionals trained to help people manage mental illness, but “this is almost certainly not the case,” he said.

There could also be legal issues following other start-ups learning from and reusing existing content.

First, Zar Saeed, a law professor at the University of Washington, said there could be problems related to the use of copyrighted images on the site (users could use You can upload an image of your choice to accompany it).

The company also enables large-scale impersonation, allowing anyone to spend hours conversing with, say, Taylor Swift and a host of copyrighted fictional characters.

Parody will have strong legal protections, and companies will have incentives to keep people from interacting with their favorite characters online. It can make a bad impression when a brand takes legal action against a popular service.

“Fans are also involved. You don’t want them to see the litigious side of brand management,” Said said.

Shazeer said the company has lawyers and responds to requests to remove content, while a Character.AI spokesperson said the company has received requests to remove a small number of avatar images. said he had responded.

To keep users firmly grounded in reality, the website displays a message at the top of the screen: “Remember: Everything the characters say is fiction!”

It’s still early days for the tech industry to fall in love with chatbots. Some experiments have already failed. For example, the National Eating Disorders Association shut down its chatbot after it started offering controversial weight loss advice.

But the rapid rise of services like Character.AI, along with ChatGPT, Inflection AI’s Pi, and others, suggest that people will increasingly be conversing with computers. The promise of smart AI friends and assistants is attractive to investors and consumers.

Mike Anany, an associate professor of communications and journalism at the University of Southern California, said he sees custom chatbots as an almost new art form.

Ananny likens Character.AI to fan fiction. Fan fiction is a twist on various age-old genres in which people create fictional stories based on existing characters in media such as movies and TV shows.

Whether people are chatting with a real person or a chatbot is “not the interesting part,” Anany said. “It’s like, ‘How do you feel?’ ‘What is aesthetics?’

Ultimately, “it doesn’t matter if they’re real,” he says.