Character AI chatbots are quietly becoming the next big thing in fandom

Elon Musks AI Grok Offers Sexualized Anime Bot

TIME may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. “This is pretty cool,” Musk wrote on X Sunday, followed by a tweet featuring a picture of “Ani” fully clothed. The Tesla CEO said Wednesday that “customizable companions” were also going to be “coming,” though he did not share a timeline for the launch.

• On Character.AI, it only takes a few minutes to create both an account and a character.
• Breakthroughs in generative AI capabilities to build foundational models are making the robot skills needed for humanoids more generalizable.
• And Jennifer Ann Crecente isn’t the only avatar being created on Character.AI without the knowledge of the people they’re based on.
• While he may never find out who created the persona of his daughter, it appears that people with ties to the gaming community often get turned into bots on the platform.
• Despite growing controversy surrounding the Grok chatbot, xAI, the company behind it, announced on Monday that it had secured a contract with the U.S.

Zapier Central debuts as no-code tool for building enterprise AI bots

Amplify your reach, spark real connections, and lead the innovation charge. We think a lot about how AI is going to change the experience at the consumer layer over time,” Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk told TechCrunch at that time. “I love finding companies in spaces that both cater to a large group of people and have an enterprise component at the same time,” he said.

Introducing STAG

Chatbot users sometimes roleplay as a fictional character from the canon in question, but frequently, they’re just speaking as themselves. It’s an approach more like the genre of self-insert fanfiction, which centers a blank slate that readers project themselves onto. Self-insert, or “Y/N” (your name) fic, lets readers on platforms like Tumblr and Wattpad insert themselves into storylines where they romance their favorite character. And they’ve long featured some level of automation — readers are meant to use a browser extension to replace the placeholder “Y/N” with their own name while reading. Unlike companies like OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, and the slew of startups building AI agents (AI tools that can perform tasks on a user’s behalf), Airbnb seems to be taking a more measured approach with AI. Chesky said in February that the company would use AI for customer service before it started implementing it for other uses like travel planning or booking tickets, as he believes the technology is still in its early days.

Custom AI chatbots are quietly becoming the next big thing in fandom

In the 1980s and ’90s, proto-chatroom MUDs and MOOs provided early adopters with a space to creatively inhabit personas. On Character.AI, a character doesn’t need to have reached a certain threshold of popularity to be recognized on the app and made interactive. You yourself can pick your dearest blorbo that perhaps only you care about and, if you’re willing to put the time in to feed it text to learn from, spin them up to talk to. Even if fully machine-written conventional fanfic never takes off, the addictive interactivity of Character.AI’s chatbots may have cracked the code for getting fans to participate enthusiastically — and more or less uncritically — in AI-generated media. Tomorrow’s successful startups and robotics companies should focus on developing new robot skills and automation tasks and leverage the full extent of available end-to-end development platforms.

And fandom outrage over AI image generators meshes oddly with fans’ embrace of AI text tools — when both raise similar issues around training data and the livelihoods of artists. One Tumblr user argued that AI bots like these aren’t “stealing artist’s hard work,” unlike visual art AI tools — but is that quite true? There are plenty of fanwriters out there who take great pride in crafting Y/N fics for every taste.

But for the most part, Shazeer and De Freitas want to show the world that chatbots can be the ideal delivery method for customized immersive entertainment. The site’s top chatbots, with millions of interactions, include versions of celebrities like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. They’re also home to many characters from popular series and games like Danganronpa and Genshin Impact as well as familiar television and film characters like Walter White, Tony Soprano, and for some reason, two versions of Loki. And unlike “Historical Figures,” most of these bots were created from scratch by users — which, to fans, has proven Character.AI’s real killer feature.

This approach transforms simple alerts into comprehensive, actionable insights tailored to the user’s specific role. For instance, STAG would detect a spike in customer complaints, communicate the reasons for that spike to a CX manager, and do so in a way that offered constructive solutions for addressing those complaints. Through its integration with advanced large language models (LLMs), STAG addresses this gap.

Its user-friendly interface and robust conversational capabilities drove this rapid adoption, and the popularity of ChatGPT among the general public bled into enterprise AI strategy. The filter is imperfect — in our tests, an AI asked explicit self-harm questions might type out a fully visible violent answer before the filter kicks in and hides it, for example. And users are endlessly creative, as experiments like ChatGPT’s “Do Anything Now” hacked mode show, so it is always possible that the bots will be put to dangerous uses. One central downside for many users is that Character.AI censors NSFW content within the app. The filter often kicks in just as things start “getting steamy.” This is a frequent enough complaint that the developers’ pinned post on the Character.AI subreddit explaining why they would be maintaining the policy was flooded by disappointed users. Many claimed that they’d be moving to rival service Pygmalion.AI, which doesn’t have an NSFW filter.

• STAG, by contrast, utilizes its LLM to add context to data trends in relevant terms, much like a RAG bot would in response to a specific query.
• In March 2025, TollBit reported that more than 26 million bot scrapes had bypassed publisher restrictions, such as robots.txt.
• It turns out that up to half the energy required to make a lithium-ion cell is used in the process of drying certain components of the battery cell.
• Alternatively, it could identify an emerging pattern of issues or complaints specific to a recent update, allowing the product leader to address these problems before they escalate quickly.

Additionally, STAG plays a critical role in bridging silos within organizations. It allows for proactively exploring unstructured data from multiple disconnected sources. This capability is particularly beneficial in large, complex organizations where crucial information is often scattered and underutilized. Because the user must ask to receive, the RAG-based interaction pattern is definitionally reactive, which makes it difficult to meet the needs of environments that demand continuous data analysis. Mercante is not the only figure within the games space currently being impersonated on the site. WIRED also found bots for people ranging from Feminist Frequency creator Anita Sarkeesian to Xbox head Phil Spencer on Character.AI.

The platform should provide simulation capabilities to train models, generate synthetic data and exercise the entire robotics software stack, with the ability to run the latest and emerging generative AI models right on the robot. Many business leaders I work with are aware that artificial intelligence is changing how customers find and evaluate information. While most teams are experimenting, bots are already crawling the internet, extracting content and serving it to potential customers without attribution, traffic or context. This week, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the implications of artificial intelligence. We already know that you can see if your images were used to train the datasets and that a lot of the training datasets out there are .

It’s a foundational shift in how business information is delivered and received. Retrieval bots are reshaping the way customers, investors and partners learn about your company. They will form an opinion about your brand based on a paragraph written by a machine you didn’t program or approve. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) bots like those used by ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews are quickly becoming the default way people consume information. According to TollBit, retrieval bot traffic rose by 49% in just the first quarter of 2025. These bots are scanning millions of websites and feeding AI tools with content that often bypasses the original source entirely.

Some startups are trying to build datasets trained exclusively on licensed data, and human artists are pretty grumpy when big-name studios use AI to generate art. Businesses investing in generative AI face a decision about how to allocate resources between different AI technologies and business applications. Given the popularity of RAG-based systems like ChatGPT, the most obvious answer today is to deploy reactive bots. However, the people who can most benefit from AI often have the least time to engage with AI tools.