Lately, young people in the United States have experienced a collective "heartbreak." The AI chatbot Character AI, which they had become obsessed with, suddenly seemed boring. The reason behind this might be due to some instructions from Google or Meta.
Character AI was once the most popular social app among Generation Z in the United States. Its chatbot model handled up to 20,000 queries per second at its peak, which is one-fifth of Google's search volume. However, now, this AI that once kept them up all night has lost its charm.
Users have found that Character AI's conversation model now gives short and indifferent responses to romantic role-playing requests, and even some previously entertaining interactions have become dull. Words like "kill" have become sensitive words, immediately flagged. Disappointed and angry users are starting to leave in large numbers.
In response to this situation, Character AI claims they have not made any changes to the model. However, it is evident that they are deeply filtering out all inappropriate content, including pornography and violence. This makes conversations with AI extremely boring, as if designed for a 2-year-old, removing all the elements that make conversations interesting.
The Character AI community on Reddit has engaged in a fierce debate with the company, with some calling it the "July Revolution." Generation Z in the United States is going wild with emojis to express their dissatisfaction.
The two founders of Character AI, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, are veterans of Google. Their AI chatbot was downloaded more than ChatGPT in the first week. Character AI allows users to freely create AI characters, including anime characters, television celebrities, and historical figures, and chat with them. The fun of this interactive experience is something that larger competitors lack.
However, with the recent changes made by the company, users feel that their core needs have been "castrated." Amidst internal and external challenges, Character AI faces high costs, fierce competition, and even poaching.
Character AI's users are mainly teenagers, who may not be interested in paying a monthly subscription fee of $9.99. According to Similarweb's data, Character's subscription growth rate is slowing down, and the growth of its mobile app's monthly users is also slowing.
Despite the various challenges, Character AI still has a strong appeal to users. On Reddit, there are 1.4 million members in the forum dedicated to discussing Character. Users spend an average of 2 hours on the platform each day, with many saying that chatting with AI robots is easier than talking to real people.
The reason Character AI's chatbots are so realistic is due to their training data and algorithms. The robots continuously improve during interactions with users, providing multiple versions of responses for users to choose from, and updating the weights based on user feedback. This training method allows the robots to simulate human conversations more realistically.
Although Character AI is facing some difficulties at the moment, its appeal to users is still significant. As the company continues to develop the next generation of large language models, we look forward to it overcoming current challenges and once again becoming a favorite among young people.