AI
MULTIPLE PEOPLE AND BOTS ARE TYPING

A startup founded by former Google employees claims that users spend two hours a day with its AI chatbots

Character.AI, which has raised $190 million in funding to date, wants people to engage with a variety of bots

By
Michelle Cheng
Screenshot of Character.ai website.
Screenshot of character.ai website.
Photo: Screenshot by Quartz.

Imagine chatting with Friedrich Nietzsche, Socrates, and René Descartes about the meaning of life. Well, there’s an app for that.

Character.AI, a startup that offers a chatbot service where users can have open-ended conversations with different characters based on real and imagined personalities, launched last September. Characters include an English teacher who will help you with grammar or a psychologist who can provide support. If users don’t click with one of the 18 million characters available, they can create a new one.

Founded by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, two former employees at Google Brain—the AI lab within the tech giant—Character.AI is betting that people want to engage with a variety of chatbots. The startup has raised $190 million in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Greycroft to date.

Notably, the company says that as of August, users on the platform spend an average of two hours a day with its chatbots. Part of the explanation the company gives is that people are interacting with different characters, which is more engaging than passively scrolling a site.

Hoping to continue to attract and retain more users—a base that currently stands at 4 million monthly active ones, according to Similarweb, a data analytics firm—the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company rolled out a feature this week where people can have a group chat on Character.AI with up to five AI characters and five humans at once. Users can identify who’s human and who’s not by looking at the group chat settings.

The group chat feature is available to paid users. The subscription, which is $9.99 a month and allows users to skip any waiting queues—needed to manage situations when there’s peak demand for the service to prevent outages or slow performance—is what helps the company scale its services. Character.AI’s service is powered by large language models, which are costly to run. The company says the feature will become available to everyone in the future.

Character.AI’s latest feature comes after Meta launched its own version of more than two dozen AI characters last month, inspired by real people like Kendall Jenner and Naomi Osaka, across its products. In response, Character.AI quickly called out the likeness on Twitter, highlighting how heated the race to build AI bots has become.

Leadership

Elon Musk is escalating his war with Disney by funding a fired Star Wars actress' lawsuit

Gina Carano is hoping to be recast on the hit Disney+ Star Wars show The Mandalorian

By
Germain Lussier / Gizmodo
Gina Carano on The Mandalorian.
Gina Carano on The Mandalorian.
Image: Lucasfilm

This is a lot so, sit down and take a deep breath. Gina Carano, the actress who was fired from The Mandalorian for “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities” is now suing Lucasfilm for discrimination and wrongful termination. And, because the comments were made on X, formerly Twitter, Elon Musk is funding the lawsuit.

“As a sign of X Corp’s commitment to free speech, we’re proud to provide financial support for Gina Carano’s lawsuit, empowering her to seek vindication of her free speech rights on X and the ability to work without bullying, harassment, or discrimination,” X’s head of business operations Joe Benarroch said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter. Carano is hoping to get a court order that would force Lucasfilm to recast her as her character, Cara Dune, as well as get punitive damages.

Carano was fired in February 2021 after the actress shared, then deleted, an anti-Semitic story on her Instagram. It was the final straw after months of statements including mocking COVID mask mandates, spreading conspiracies about the United States election, liking posts disparaging the Black Lives Matter movement, and deriding pronoun usage. “Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” a statement first obtained by io9 said at the time. “Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

According to Carano though, while Lucasfilm claims it fired her over those statements, she thinks it was only because she was a woman, and male co-stars made similarly offensive posts that were ignored. “Some of us have been unjustly singled out, harassed, persecuted and had our livelihoods stripped away because we dared to encourage conversation, asked questions, and refused to go along with the mob,” Carano said in a statement.

She’s also, as you’d expect, happy that Musk and X are helping in the fight. “I am honored that my case has been chosen to be supported by the company that has been one of the last glimmers of hope for free speech in the world,” Carano said.

io9 reached out to Lucasfilm for potential comment and we’ll update this story if or when we hear back.

This article originally appeared on Gizmodo.