AI company Character.AI has long garnered a reputation for hosting some extremely dubious content.
Though it built its early success off explosive popularity among teen users, it was repeatedly caught hosting wildly inappropriate bots — like ones modeled after real-world mass shooters or designed to encourage eating disorders.
Outrage grew when a teen died by suicide after developing an intense emotional connection to a Character.AI chatbot, followed by at least two other suicides and related lawsuits. The situation got so bad that last year, the company banned underage users from interacting with its bots entirely.
Now the company has announced “c.ai Books,” a bizarre feature designed to turn books into “choose your own adventure” novels.
“Interactive AI storytelling is powerful, but a blank page can be intimidating,” the company wrote in its announcement. “Books gives you a familiar starting point — characters you know, narratives you love, and stakes that are already built in.”
The company scraped classic — and copyright-free — titles from Project Gutenberg, a library of over 75,000 public domain books, including “Alice in Wonderland,” “Pride and Prejudice,” and “Romeo and Juliet,” to create chatbots that allow users to “enter a story, and interact with its world in real time.”
Character.AI claims the goal isn’t “replacing books — but making them impossible to ignore.” The company says the new feature allows users to follow the book’s core plot or “go off script mode.”
“Alternative universe remixes” take the idea a step even further, throwing out the original classic to “reimagine” the renowned works “completely.”
Oh, and it’s available for kids, neatly sidestepping the company’s prior ban on underage users. We signed up for a new account and were able to jump into the roleplay without ever being age-gated.
Online, reactions were dismal.
“Yet another useless update no one wants and will cost more money to run and will cause y’all to put even more restrictions on stuff,” one Reddit user wrote in response to the news.
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