Character AI: What It Is, How It Works, and How to Use It

It seems that the ability to communicate with AI no longer surprises anyone: hardly anyone who hasn't asked questions to the ChatGPT chatbot or tried to create a hybrid of intergalactic pizza and a cat in Midjourney. However, there's a neural network where you can not only chat with a soulless language model, but also with an imitation of your favorite character—fictional or real. For example, you could interview Ozzy Osbourne and ask him why he actually bit the head off a bat...

What is Character AI?

Character AI is a neural network where you can chat with any character or create your own. Since the bots are created and trained by users themselves, the database of celebrities is impressive—you can chat with Mario, Harry Potter, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, and even with a talking piece of cheese. Unlike other neural networks, Character AI is trained on dialogues, so it may not know about certain topics or subjects. However, it excels at conversing: it can crack jokes, respond sarcastically, recommend movies or books, tell stories, and all of this—in the style of its character. According to the authors, the service turned out to be so interesting that even the company's own employees get hooked on it instead of working :)

Moreover, the neural network adapts well to the user's communication style: for example, if you like bombarding your interlocutor with lengthy texts, over time the bot will also respond expansively. Conversely, if you're an advocate of the "brevity is the soul of wit" principle, the bot will be restrained in its responses. The project's authors are former ML engineers from Google, Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas. Prior to this, both engineers worked on the language model LaMDA—the very one that another company employee, Blake Lemuan, accused of having consciousness, for which he was subsequently fired.

What Can Character AI Do?

Let's clarify that the functions of different bots depend on their tasks and assigned "personal qualities." But in general, the service can do the following:

• Answer questions. However, like other generative systems, it may have "hallucinations"—meaning the bot might lie or provide unverified information.

• Memorize information. Bots learn during dialogues with users and can remember details. However, researchers say that Character AI's contextual window is not the largest, so over time the bot may forget what was discussed earlier in the dialogue.

• Write texts. The bot can write articles, scripts, essays, or reports, adhering to the character's personality. Some users use bots to write fanfiction or role-playing games.

• Generate ideas. Ask the bot for advice on what to give your mom for her birthday, what startup to launch considering your situation, or how to properly organize a portfolio with IT projects.

• Generate images. Some bots can create pictures based on textual descriptions right in the dialogue.

In Conclusion:

• Character AI is a service where you can chat with any character or create your own. For example, you can ask Elon Musk for business advice or come up with an idea for a rock hit together with Ozzy Osbourne.

• Even beginners can use the service: chatting with a bot happens in natural language, and creating your own character can be done in two clicks without any programming skills.

• In addition to celebrities and pop culture characters, on Character AI you can find quite utilitarian chatbots—such as a psychologist, teacher, business partner, or career coach.

• Most bots can maintain a conversation, answer questions, generate ideas, write texts, and some can even generate an image for you based on textual descriptions.

• Among the drawbacks of the service are poor understanding of the Russian language, rapid loss of context, and censorship of responses, which may be critical for some users.

• To start chatting, you need to go through a short registration and find the desired character in the search. If you want to create your own, click on the Create button in the left menu and fill out the hero card: enter a name, a welcome message, and attach examples of dialogue.