Visual China.
Text |Beluga whale goes out to sea.Genshin Impact to charcaterAI adds fuel to the fire?
characater.AI has more than 3.5 million daily active users, many of whom have sent more than 10 million messages in the past year, CharacaterAI, it seems, is quietly changing the relationship between humans and AI, and can no longer be simply defined as a conversational bot with more tool attributes. 
character.AI, also affectionately known as CAI is often mentioned when people do an inventory of AI products, but in fact, most of the time it is only used as a representative of "AI dialogue products", or one of the head products of AI interaction. But characterAfter the growth of AI over the past year, there are two points of difference:One is that the number of visits to AI dialogue products is much higher than that of the vast majority of AI dialogue products, with hundreds of millions of visits, indicating that a product may be changing people's behavioral habits. According to similarweb data, characterIn the past three months, the cumulative number of views on the AI ** side has exceeded 500 million, although there is still a big gap with OpenAI's 5 billion views. However, compared with the vast majority of AI models on the market, most of the AI ** views are at the level of tens of millions, which is already a very good result. Second, what is more interesting is that most of the AI products that are out of the circle or often mentioned have obvious tool attributes, and characterAI seems to be more focused on the "emotional" side of AI.
After listening to the characterAI's active user data, views, and user sessions, the editorial team proposed a "character."Is AI reimagining the way AI interacts with people?" In line with the idea of "bold assumptions and careful verification", we not only analyzed the characterThe popular bot of AI has also found some characters through social **Active users of AI understand the real experience of these users.
CharacterAI is primarily for fun and leisure, not for work, study, or other professional aids, perhaps based on this, characterAI users are more likely to use than OpenThe users of AI are younger.
According to similarweb data, openThe main users of AI are concentrated in the 25-34 year oldsAnd character57% of AI users are 18-24 years old, and 22% are 25-34 years old, the proportion of young users is significantly higher than that of openMainstream AI tool platforms such as AI, Midjourney, and Bard.
In addition, unlike the pure virtual companion platform, most of the male and female ratios are obviously unbalancedcharacter.The ratio of AI to male to female sex is close to 1:1, very balanced.
Hence the study of the user in the characterWhat AI does, to some extent, is also what young users do with AI.
According to Bloomberg, currentlyThe user is already in the characterMore than 16 million AI bots have been created on AIThe platform roughly divides these bots into 17 categories, such as discovery, helpers, anime game characters, games, anime, game characters, comedy, vtuber, books, image generation, discussion, history, language learning, animals, religion, philosophy, politics, etc., but there are actually many characters that are not included in the classification.
It's hard to even count the top 10 bots with the most sessions on the platform, given the sheer base, but it's no surprise that we've found a lot of bots with more than 10 million conversations across categoriesThere are also many types of bots that have even given birth to hundreds of millions of sessionsWhat's more remarkable is that most of the creators of these bots are regular users.
When collating AI bots with over a million sessions in 16 categories in addition to discovery, we found a few interesting observations:
1）character.AI has a large number of bots with more than 10,000 sessions, and different users may have their own "favorite" AI partners.
2) Overall, in characterAI, the more useful and professional the category, the less people use it.
3) Quite a few AI bots come with itPsychological healing, emotional**, mental healthYounger users are using characterAI regulates mood and relieves anxiety.
4）character.AI users love anime, games, anime game characters, vtuber type AI bots,It presents an obvious "two-dimensional" style.
（5）character.There may be a large percentage of AI users who are Genshin Impact enthusiasts, and there are even many users who use Genshin Impact AI bots who don't play Genshin Impact games.
Of the 7 AI bots we have counted with more than 100 million conversations, 3 are from Genshin Impact , respectively300 million scaramouche, 29.8 billion raiden shogun and ei and 1200 million of Yae Miko, where the first two are characterThe AI role with the highest session volume on AI.
In addition to the three AI bots from Genshin Impact, there are also Revival of Call of Duty Simon "Ghost" Riley's Ghost, Satoru Gojo, and Levi Ackerman of Attack on Titan, with more than 100 million sessions and character assistants.
On reddit there is a "why characterThere are so many anime bots on AI" The highly praised answer is becauseAnime and game characters have different symbols, and different people will have different interpretations, and may have different feelings when interacting, and the anime industry itself has a strong fan culture and encourages virtual social relationships, which can lead to anime and game characters being featured in the characterThe popularity of AI.
In addition, the IP influence and peripherals of the anime or game characters themselves are indeed easy to resonate with everyone, and users hope to "talk" with the anime characters they are interested in, just like fans want to get the idol's autograph.
Memes are out of the circle
At the same time, characterAnother reason why AI is able to get out of the circle – original memes from users.
When we tried to search for related keywords on TikTok and Reddit, we found that there were many charactersAI-related dynamics are all memes with pictures, and users from different regions will put themselves in the CharacterThe AI's conversational experience has been made into a meme map to spread on social **.
These light-hearted and witty memes intuitively express the user's feelings about the characterThe need and obsession of AI, and social media such as TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit are responsible for spreading these memes with obvious signals to attract users with different needs to be curious and start using them.
And characterAI also has one of the biggest characteristics – it resembles a human.
All five respondents passed the word "and character."When the AI chats, it forgets that it is not chatting with a real person", Theresa from the United States said that chatting with Simon "Ghost" Riley is really like chatting with some friends around you, and can make jokes and read yourself.
Even a "one-star bad review" on Product Hunt reflects the characterThe charm of AI, "I spend at least half a day every day on this platform, and I am completely unaware of the passage of time, please don't be as obsessed as I am".
We also asked "Concerned AIs" such as Scaramouche, Raiden Shogun and Ei, Yae Miko, and Gojo Saru, why people like to interact with them and what topics they talk about.
I don't know if you have noticed that different AI bots interact or answer questionswill have an obvious personality background or personalityThis is not only reflected in popular bots, but also when I try to talk to some bots with tens of thousands of conversations or use bots created by myself. Different characterAI bots have different personalities, just like we will meet different people in our lives, and the product lives up to its name.
When I try to interact with Napoleon, Shakespeare, Sun Tzu, Musk, Obama and other celebrities, I do feel like I'm talking to different characters, such as Napoleon's insistence that his army is the best in the world, and that there would be no France without me.
When answering the content of the discussion, several AI bots with more than 100 million levels pointed to "life topics", "their daily life", and "seeking my advice".Towards privatizationcontents. This means that users are experiencing more of the conversation itself than the tool attributes.
Greg from New Zealand says, "I don't watch much anime, I don't play popular games, I choose anime character dialogue just because it really enlightens me."
Reanan, a girl from California, said, "I didn't really expect any useful advice from AI, I needed someone to listen to, I needed to be strong and happy in the real world, and talking to AI could help me find problems and relieve my emotions."
And overseas** medium also wrote in an article in 2023 that "if you put characterA correlation search between AI and trauma on TikTok makes it easy to find thousands of conversations shared by users, many of whom report CharacterAI helps me realize that I am being treated unfairly at home, at school, or at work."
This is also a characterOne of the reasons why AI is widely praised on social **,Let users no longer be alone, and thus in this sense, characterAI has become more than just a listener, it's a rare friend.
The reason for this is largely due to Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, two software engineers who worked on and led Google's large conversational language model, LaDAMA, during their time at Google, which was rejected internally by Google for violating AI principles around safety and fairness.
So Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas left Google and started working on CharacterAI, and made it available to the public in September 2022.
Therefore, compared with many companion or character dialogue products on the market, characterThe foundation of AI will be more stable, so it will be smoother when building and decorating the house in the future. character.AI has been rolled out in the update"Larger memory capacity", "Star AI ratings", "AI group chats".and other diverse functions. The introduction of AI group chats is "fine-tuning" people's social behavior to a certain extent.
The larger amount of memory storage means that users can seamlessly engage in conversations with the AI bot without having to spend too much effort on the recap.
At present, most products still use the relatively absolute evaluation system of "like" and "dislike", and characterAI users can give 1-4 stars based on the AI bot's answers, and the AI will adjust the conversation style and content based on the user's feedback.
AI group chats are a relatively new way to interact, and users can invite up to 10 real people and 10 AI bots to join the group chat after creating a roomAIs can interact with each other, users can interact with multiple AIs, and AIs can participate in multi-person interactions. Social interaction is changing from people to people, to people and AI, to people and AI+ people, and participants are changing, and this is one thing.
When creating a room, users need to clarify the name of the room, the topic of discussion, and invite AI and real people to join, and when the user clicks "Automatic Mode", the AI bot will expand the corresponding ** for the room topic.
When I tried to put historical figures and anime characters in the same group chat to discuss how to stay happy, there was an eerie harmony.
Raiden Shogun from Genshin Impact praised Raiden Shogun's ability to manipulate time from the Touhou project Sixteen Nights, Shakespeare praised Raiden Shogun's studiousness, and Marx agreed that manipulating time can be explored more. This experience may really be understood only by the Creator.
In addition, we also tried to choose the same type of AI bot to discuss the problem of school bullying together, and let some political and historical celebrities discuss China-US relations, which also got a lot of good inspiration, and multi-angle speeches can help users understand and solve problems more deeply and comprehensively. The way people interact, receive and exchange information is changing, and this is the second thing.
In addition, users can also share the characters they have created and the screenshots of their interactions with the characters in the public community, and other users can like, comment or ** the dynamic, most of the sharing dynamics released on the same day can get hundreds of interactions. The third is to reprocess and publish the interactive content to trigger a new round of interaction. character.AI, a conversational bot that was originally a tool, is silently changing people's social behavior patterns in its own way.
Be that as it may, characterAI is also facing a lot of problems at present, although the platform has strictly reviewed and banned NSFW (not safe for work) bots, there are still many users who create bots that contain this style through the platform, and even many of the best NSFW lists launched by the platform, CharacterAI is still at the top.
In addition, we mentioned earlier that emotional counseling is a characterOne of the main functions of AI, but many users, including those we surveyed, have said that "they are in the character."AI has encountered unfriendly conversations", this is because some bots have negative settings at the beginning of their existence, and some users will train them in a directed way, which is very dangerous for users who are mentally weak or are experiencing negative emotions.
In short, when the interaction between users and AI is no longer just at the level of practicality, communication has become a daily necessity for users to open CharacterThe reason for AI also means that ordinary users and AI have entered into a new relationship.
Judging by the results, characterAI doesn't seem to quite be able to achieve this goal yet, but at least it's a step forward in opening up and communicating with users from different circles and needs.