AI chatbots that can simulate human conversation have become increasingly popular. Businesses are inducting chatbot personas to increase their customer service efficacy. Developed economies like Japan incorporate AI technology in many sectors. According to Statista, the number of robotics-related patent applications has increased in Japan since 2014, and it has led up to what is called to be Japan's “third AI boom.” In this age of science, when technological advancements are being made everywhere and in every area of life, whether related to business or social life, the chatting experience has taken on a new tide in the form of Character AI – a chatbot web application. This AI chatbot driven by a neural language model is taking the sci-fi dream of open-ended conversation to the next level.
Character.AI is making its mark in the entertainment domain as well. The fantasy of the human mind is to be able to interact with any celebrity, fictional, or anime character, whether this interaction is vocal or textual. All humans make up characters in their minds that they wish were true, but due to the boundary between fiction and real life, these characters are impossible to interact with. Surprisingly, Character AI has solved the problem and made it easy to experience such fantasies by leveraging the power of generative AI. Now, you can generate any character you had ever idealized or imagined, shape its personality, and incorporate specific parameters to create a certain persona. This feature of creating personas from users’ imagination and enabling a delightful chat between the AI-generated characters and the users have made Character AI the most appealing chatbot web application. With this digital personality generator, users can generate fully customized AI companions with unique personalities. Twitter is filled with Character AI fans spending consecutive hours conversing with their favorite AI characters. Unlike Uberduck AI, which allows you to communicate “vocally” with the chatbots in the voice of anyone you want, Character AI is limited to effective “textual” conversation only.
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Let's explore it as we mean it!
What is Character AI?
Character AI is a chatbot personality generator, launched in September 2022 in its beta version for testing purposes. Created by former Google’s LaMDA developers – Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, this AI bot allows you to experience a text-based chat with an AI-generated personality of your choice. These characters range from the already ingrained ones, such as a fictional character, or a celebrity to the ones you visualize or the ones other users have already fabricated. You will also find artificial personas for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and many other renowned personalities under the “Famous” tab of this new generation of dialogue agents. Character AI lets you feel involved in a contextual conversation with your favorite celebrity by generating human-like text responses. Freedom to have group chats with numerous AI characters is the most captivating feature of this AI bot which employs machine learning. Based on a neural language model, this AI text generator creates amazing text to spark conversation.
These chatbots simulate the experience of having a meaningful chat with a real person. Character.AI is emerging as a fun alternative for ChatGPT when this much-hyped chatbot faces troubleshooting issues. Similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Character AI is publicly available to anyone. Yeah! You heard that right! Anyone can use this AI bot just like any other text generator. As for now, beta character ai is free to use. But shortly, some of its features might require a premium membership.
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This programmed dialogue agent called character.ai shows significant advances in chatbot technology. Even before such robotic personality generators, businesses used applications and websites similar to character.ai. You might be familiar with the customer service chat box systems that tend to the customer's requests. You might have experienced it when you inquire in a brand's chat box about the availability of a certain product or if someone you're calling is busy on another call. In these cases, you are replied to by these programmed personas. However, Character AI distinguishes itself by giving its users the opportunity to generate personalized AI character to have a contextual chat with it. Isn’t it enchanting? Let’s dig into how this artificial personality generator actually works!
How Does Character.AI Work?
Similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Character AI works on the neural language model that can automate human-like responses in textual conversation. This language model has advantages over n-gram language models. Its cutting edge over other models is based on its ability to handle longer history and offer higher accuracy. The personalities created are bound to produce an output in chat based on the parameters involved in fabricating that character. Let's learn how Character AI works!
Creating a Room or a Character
Character refers to the chatbot's personality that you want to personify. The "Room" specifies the automated personas you want to have a conversation with simultaneously in a single sitting. Creating an AI bot is incredibly easy. You just have to enter a name along with a brief introductory sentence about your character to launch this AI character bot. The generated character can be further refined later on by simply editing the introductory sentences or giving feedback on its responses. In Character AI, you can create limitless characters. Reading about the features might not be a better idea, so allow me to practically experience these features for you. Yes! I just signed up on Characteer.AI to explore it, so sit tight and continue reading.
- Create a Character
After signing up/signing in to Character.AI, an option on the left side goes like "Create."
After clicking on it, we select Create a Character, and it asks for information about the type of personality that we want to create.
You can assign a name, Image, or avatar and a greeting to the personality you want to generate. In the greetings section, you need to eloborate your desired character as demonstrated by this AI tool itself, then click on “Create Image.”
After creating the character, you just need to click on “Create and Chat” tab at the bottom to start conversation with it.
- Create a Room
You can build a room by clicking on "Create," just like creating a character on Character AI. Select the option to make a “room," and you will be asked to name the room, the topic of discussion inside, and the characters you want to include. You will have to fill these boxes in then click on “Create it.”
A room can contain a maximum of ten chatbot characters and a minimum of 1.
Once you create a room, you can chat with each AI character you selected. A room full of bots and you! You would be amazed when you start conversing; it might even feel like you're with humans! Which isn't true, of course!
Chat with an AI Character
Now, as we have created the AI Character and the Room, let’s have a dialogue with the personality I have always idealized – “Elon Musk.” Here is the screenshot of his reply when I asked his digital persona about Character AI!
Wow!! Elon Musk also seems impressed and considers it a giant leap toward the AI revolution. What a feverish experience to talk with this charismatic and visionary personality I have always admired!
If you want to chat on any spicy or trending topic with your favorite character, click here to get this thrilling experience!
Character AI NSFW Filter
NSFW is used for "Not Safe for Work." It is an abbreviation for content that might be inappropriate to be viewed at work or even in public places. NSFW filter has been used as a tag in the digital world for a long time. Most prominent social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offer this tag to explicit content. At first, it was mostly used to reference violence, nudity, and sexual content. Now it has expanded to include broader content that might pose a potential triggering effect for the viewers. An example might be a page about cleaning a dirty toilet containing dirty images tagged as such.
Character AI has also introduced an NSFW filter which implies that unless you're comfortable with being asked about what you're doing by the HRM (Human Resource Management) department at work or even in public by someone, you should avoid watching content with such a tag. This chatbot personality generator offers a content warning that urges the user to show subtlety or avoid such a post, Image, or textual conversation in a professional setting or public space.
Character AI NSFW Petition
Yes, you heard that right! Some users are unhappy with the NSFW filter of Character AI as they believe it worsens the creativity and quality of AI characters. What if you are enjoying some informal conversation with your favorite AI character, and suddenly some of the texts from your favorite character are automatically removed? Isn't it so annoying? So, the users are filing a petition on change.org to remove the NSFW filter from all the chatbot personas. Character AI allows users to create fictional characters and has proven to be an amusing and creative platform for many users. But the enactment of an NSFW filter automatically removes conversations or changes the flow of the dialogue if it finds the content improper.
NSFW has hindered many users from conversing concurrently with their fiction's artificial digital personalities, and it might prove to be a limiter against the full potential of this chatbot tool. So, a toggle can be added to the interphase to enable the users to deactivate or activate this filter. A separate petition for this NSFW toggle addition is also being carried out online. Toggle addition might solve this problem, but its implementation can give rise to more issues that are more difficult to resolve, like the public use of NSFW content generated by such automation tools that evade even the NSFL (Not Safe for Life) tag.
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Character.AI Alternative
If the NSFW filters of Character AI annoy you and the conversation moderation prevents you from enjoying free speech with your AI character, you can try Chai: Chat with AI Friends – an alternative for character.ai. Harnessing the power of ChaiGPT technology, this AI chatbot will engage you in never-ending conversations personalized to your interests. Its built-in NSFW toggles will not restrict you from having intimate and cozy conversations with the AI character you have always dreamt of.
Character AI – Challenges & Limitations
Ethical Scrutiny
Character AI is an amazing frontier in machine learning. As with any other technological advancement, ethical concerns and challenges exist surrounding the implication of such automation tools. These challenges and morals should always be considered to ensure that such technology is positioned responsibly in human society.
There are characters like a psychologist, a fitness trainer, a cook, an attorney, and even a doctor. You can interact with them, but the question arises: Can a fitness trainer's chatbot persona be trusted with your body? Do you think a mechanic personality of a cook be trusted with a healthy meal with the flavor you want? Can you trust the words of an artificial attorney? Can you entrust your mental health to a digital character of a psychologist, and can you take a pill prescribed by a doctor in Character AI to cure yourself or your loved ones?
Biased Information
A mechanic personality in Character AI delivers the information, but is it derived from a natural source? Robotic personalities are now going to deliver vital data to humans! These artificial characters have a limited range of responses, and these responses are pre-programmed by those bound by human prejudice and inclination, just like us. These preconceived ideas lead to additional concerns about manipulating the responses in such chatbot generators.
In the past, Microsoft introduced Tay – an AI chatbot, and because of this, the company had to face much backlash from the general public. It was a Twitter bot that would chat with users on Twitter from around the globe. At first, the conversations involved with this chatbot were friendly and positive. But its algorithm was soon taken advantage of to produce indecent chat filled with racism, misogyny, and contempt. Same can be true for this AI character chatbot.
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Data Authenticity
After the viral launch of ChatGPT, Google launched its chatbot, Bard. It was introduced despite the warnings of Sundar Pichai, a chief at this company, about the harms of the quick implication of these chatbots. In its first demo, Bard made an error about the James Web Space Telescope. The artificial personas in Character AI make things up and act online in a chat, just like an actor who plays a role in the offline world. The dialogue these actors make can be true based on facts or can be based solely on fantasies.
Sarah Bird, the head of responsible AI leader at Azure AI and Open AI technologies, admitted that these digitally programmed bots can still daydream information that is not authentic to be delivered to the general public. Microsoft Bing chatbot also made dumb statements and showed a search result that claimed that running was invented in the 1700s. Anything goes when you trust a chatbot persona!
Privacy Violation
Character AI is accessible to the general public, but can privacy and user details be secure if businesses start using it? Sensitive corporate information and private user information can't be entrusted to a chatbot, and to top it all off, our conversation with these robotic personas might not be secure. The issue of security, when it comes specifically to corporate information stored in the database of this AI character chatbot, might even raise some eyebrows as we can't question a chatbot in the recovery of data after substantial loss.
Is Character AI Safe?
With the increased hype and urge to use this digital personality generator, people are concerned to get the answer to the most prevailing question before enjoying it - Is beta Character AI safe? Well, this AI chatbot generator denies the allegations of reading the private conversation of its users with digital personalities. So, character.ai is safe in terms of private chat. Its NSFW filters are another proof to consider it a safe platform. However, there are still some challenges or limitations of this AI character generator that need to be addresses before confirming it entirely safe for the users.
Final Thought
Character AI is a gigantic breakthrough if we think about it being used to assist robots in the future to communicate with humans in the most natural way. But these personality generation tools have a long way to go before realizing that goal. The difference between an actual human chat and a conversation with these AI characters is clear due to their insensitive nature, as they are emotionless. It would not be easy to implement these chatbot-generating tools in all enterprises around the globe as they don't adapt to the external environment as humans do. Conversation with AI characters is hell fun, whether you share your most intimate emotions with them, or converse on spicy topics, you will never get bored. However, Robotic personalities in Character AI don't possess actual intelligence and sensory nature. Besides these aspects of life, emotional intelligence is only specific to humans, and it can not be imitated or instilled inside a chatbot persona which don’t have its own personality.
Whether you use Character AI or not is entirely up to you! You can have fun using it to conversate with famous personalities or your fantasized characters. But the warmth and affection you can feel while talking to or texting with a human being is irreplaceable, for sure. In a nutshell, an AI character can't match human contextual conversation but can be used to practice your conversation skills or just for fun to get an immersive and personalized experience.