Fans are always curious and engaged in the lives of their favorite fictional characters and non-fictional personalities. Now A.I. is helping move the wheel by allowing fandoms to connect with popular characters online without any hassle.
Character.ai is an artificial intelligence website created by two former Google engineers, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas. It lets the user enter chatrooms to interact with characters, fictional or real, dead or alive. However, there is a catch: The conversation is fictional and the other participant is a chatbot, not a real person.
According to Master WP , the artificial intelligence-generated chatbot can acquire any personality the user wishes to interact with. For example, if someone wants to talk with a favorite meme character or a favorite movie, book, or television series character, the chatbot would chat with the user as that character. It can also talk like a real living person: a political figure or celebrity.
Character AI is the best thing ever 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/l6yw2E1BGy
— Rads ⚡ (@orceress) March 16, 2023
Various fandoms are having an engaging time on this A.I. based conversational platform. According to NBC News , fans have taken a fancy to this free website. The users are presented with various tools to interact with their idols including “how to interview” or “write a story” or even the tool called the “help me make a decision” option .
The most popular among the characters are the fictional Joel Miller played by Pedro Pascal in the dystopian HBO thriller The Last of Us and the former president Donald Trump. Founder of the platform Stan, Denisha Kuhlor, explained the current trend: “I think fans, in general, are looking for more and more ways to connect with their favorite personalities, especially online,” she said. 
“Folks who, in the past, would have just been kind of viewers and played on the sidelines as more spectators, are now encouraged [to participate] whether it’s, you know, just dueting a video on TikTok or even commenting — I think [character.ai] it’s like that next iteration of folks contributing to creating content as well,” Kuhlor continued.
This type of platform allows people to have more experience in the fan fiction realm, said Kuhlor. Further describing the technology, she said that character.ai makes the barrier to entry “a lot lower” for those who want to start writing fan fiction.
The A.I. platform also warns that the chats with their favorite personalities are not real – “The product is based on neural language models,” the site states in its FAQ. “A supercomputer reads huge amounts of text and learns to hallucinate what words might come next in any given situation.” It further states, “So while they can be entertaining and useful in a lot of ways, they can also recommend a song that doesn’t exist or provide links to fake evidence to support their claims.”
Experts are also voicing their opinion that spending too much time with fictional characters online could lead to less interaction with the real world. Hence conversations on Character.ai are to be taken lightly. After all the A.I. website warns, “Characters are good at pretending to be real — that means imitating how humans talk.”