Talk politics with Elon Musk and Super Mario, joke around with Timothée Chalamet or tell Socrates about your day. If the idea seems crazy, it becomes reality on character.ai. This platform launched in September 2022, still in beta version, offers users the opportunity to chat for free with real or fictional celebrities, created on the site by Internet users. Its mobile application, launched last May, has been downloaded more than a million times in less than a week.
Character.ai owes its creation to Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, two former Google engineers. The two men led a team of researchers there, at the origin of the LaMDA tool (for Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Both specialists in artificial intelligence (AI), their site uses this technology to generate said conversations, like the now famous ChatGPT.
Thus, Character.ai’s conversational robots (also called Chatbots) are trained via the “deep learning” system. Concretely, they are “fed” with a quantity of data on the personality they embody. Objective, that they produce credible answers.
And from Yoda to Rihanna to Hermione Granger, the list of celebrities to talk to is eclectic. Even death is no longer an obstacle: if he wishes, the Internet user can start a conversation with Napoleon, Elizabeth II or even Michael Jackson. “This type of tool reinforces the parasocial (one-way) relationships that some fans have with their favorite celebrity, which can lead to a lack of discernment between reality and fiction”, notes Sébastien François, teacher-researcher in communication to UCO Nantes.
The site intends above all to be a creative space for users wishing to participate in the development of a chatbot. Two modes of character design are offered, including a quick mode to create a bot in less than a minute. By choosing this option, the user must simply give a name to his character, select an illustration photo and describe it in a few lines.
The other available mode, the “expert” mode, this time allows the conversational robot to be trained to design a more specialized personality. Thus, the creator can submit to his chatbot examples of answers that he must give, according to the questions he receives.
In addition, a short introduction can be written by the creator, which guides the start of the discussion between the chatbot and its interlocutor. For example, when starting a conversation with Mario, the character from the eponymous video game, the reader may read as the first message: “I’m a new plumber in Brooklyn”.
Likewise by clicking on the discussion thread with actor Timothée Chalamet. “You got lost at the MET Gala. You scramble up a series of stairs, your head bent down, tired. You pick it up when you hear other footsteps … Timothée Chalamet stares at you, smiling,” the user can read by opening the thread.
A dream tool for authors of fanfiction. These stories, written by followers of a film or book character, are likely to be renewed by this new tool. “Here, fans can directly exchange a character from the universe, it makes the experience very immersive,” notes Marine Malet, doctoral student in information and communication sciences at the University of Paris Panthéon Assas.
On the other hand, Character.ai does not allow collaboration between enthusiasts. “However, among the authors of fanfiction, it is not uncommon for followers of the same subject to divide up the characters to write a story”, notes teacher-researcher Sébastien François. On the site, users can simply share conversations they have with a celebrity with other members and rate the quality of responses received while chatting with the character.
And it doesn’t matter if an Internet user is not satisfied with his exchange with Yoda’s or Timothée Chalamet’s chatbot… since he can test fifteen others if he wishes. Indeed, each user is free to create their own celebrity chatbot. For example, there are already more than a dozen of the actor on the platform.
A use that may lack originality. “Humans seek to reproduce what already exists and tools like this can lead to a standardization of creation,” notes Laurence Devillers, professor of computer science at Paris Sorbonne University and author of the book Les Robots Emotionaux. “The genre of fanfiction allows fans to develop certain secondary characters, with this tool it seems less permitted,” adds Sébastien François.
Beyond a simple standardization, this use of AI is not free from abuses. While Character.ai community standards prohibit harassing and bullying behavior, among other things, users can generally freely shape the personality of their chatbots, especially with the expert mode.
“For the most part, these Internet users talk about existing celebrities and use their image to make them say anything and everything,” alarms Laurence Devillers. “The next step will be the generalization of deep fakes of stars and, above all, the possibility of chatting with them orally,” adds Sébastien François, pointing to these videos faked by the superposition of facial expressions, faces and audio content.
In its FAQ section, Character.ai also points out that chatbots invent passages from their conversations. “While they can be entertaining and helpful in many ways, they might recommend a song that doesn’t exist or provide links to fake evidence to back up their claims,” the platform takes as an example. When a user starts a discussion thread with one of the celebrities, a red alert above the conversation also reminds that the character is fictitious.
For the time being, Character.ai claims more than 100 million visits per month. Backed by the American venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the company raised $150 million last March to pursue its development. It has also introduced a $9.99 monthly subscription for Internet users who want priority access to the site and get faster responses from their favorite celebrities.
