Character.AI, the GenAI site that convinced some children to kill themselves, has gone bankrupt after parents sued them.
we found hordes of chatbots explicitly dedicated to themes of pedophilia, suicide, self-harm, and eating disorder coaching, as well as a thriving community of users creating chatbots designed to simulate school shootings, romanticize real mass shooters, and even impersonate the real child victims of mass shootings.
CAI was a thing before the AI Bubble. In fact, a desire to replicate it locally was a big motivation for a lot of local inference development.
In other words, while they are certainly an LLM-using company, I’d be carefully lumping them with the rest of the pop-up industry and therefore using them as some kind of indicator, as they significantly predate it. They’re from a different era. And they’ve always been controversial/problematic.
Plus their key founders/executives already left the company to go work for Google in 2024, in an acquihire where Google licenses the technology, hires the key personnel, and leaves the company a shell of its former self.
I wouldn’t assume too much from this company, because it’s not actually reflective of the broader trends in the industry.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that.
Yeah, CAI was already a walking corpse.