Character.AI Removes Popular Fictional Characters Amid Copyright Concerns

Why your favorite fictional AI friends are vanishing from Character.AI

Harry Potter, Superman, and Daenerys Targaryen are no match for copyright law The many AI-powered chatbots emulating famous fictional personalities are leaving the digital halls of Character.AI as the company seeks to crack down on AI imitations of intellectual property. The oft-ignored specter of copyright law hovers over the ranks of virtual companions imitating your favorite fictional personalities, taking a scythe to the names you recognize from films, books, TV shows, and comics. Character.AI confirmed in a statement to Futurism that it is seeking to comply with copyright law seems like an obvious choice at first glance. No company wants to be vulnerable to legal attacks by giant corporations with infinite lawyers. That said, a huge amount of discourse on Character.AI involves users engaging with AI versions of fictitious people (or cartoon rabbits, hobbits, and more). Fans roleplaying friendship with the AI simulacra are upset, but Character.AI's larger goals demand a bit more fidelity to intellectual property laws. Character.AI's statement just restates the relevant part of a blog post explaining how the company recently updated its terms and conditions. The changes emphasized making the platform safer for children and upping content moderation as well as boosting copyright law enforcement. "We conduct proactive detection and moderation of user-created Characters, including using industry-standard and custom blocklists that are regularly updated. We proactively, and in response to user reports, remove Characters that violate our Terms of Service," Character.AI explained in its post. "Users may notice that we've recently removed a group of Characters that have been flagged as violative, and these will be added to our custom blocklists moving forward." The effort appears incomplete so far. The characters with the exact name of a character are mostly gone, but more elaborate or silly variants survive. No more Harry Potter or Daenerys Targaryen but Harold Putter and Dany Dragonlady live to talk for at least a little longer. Even with the loopholes in place, it's questionable if Character.AI's popularity will survive the cull. Talking to figures from favorite films and books, even just an AI imitation, will entice plenty of people otherwise uninterested in AI. Features like audible voices and the two-way voice conversations available with Character Calls might not have the same draw. Will they stick around for original characters or do they prefer those based on historical celebrities?

Character.AI Confirms Mass Deletion of Fandom Characters, Says They're Not Coming Back

Sorry, fandoms: it sounds like your favorite Character.AI bots aren't coming back. The embattled AI companion company Character.AI confirmed to Futurism that it removed a large number of characters from its platform, citing its adherence to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) and copyright law, but failing to say whether the deletions were proactive or in response to requests from the holders of the characters' intellectual property rights. As we reported yesterday, Character.AI took to social media in droves this week to decry the deletion of chatbots based on characters from the beloved "Harry Potter" series. When we dug deeper, we noticed that other chatbots stemming from Warner Bros. Discovery-held film rights had disappeared, too: characters from the HBO hit "Game of Thrones," the DC Universe, and even "Looney Tunes" cartoons like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck have been vaporized from the platform. Many of the removed AI bots once raked in thousands -- and in some cases, millions -- of user chats. We asked Character.AI about the Potterverse erasure, and whether Warner Bros. Discovery had requested the removal of AI chatbot characters based on copyrighted characters. It didn't respond directly to the latter question, but confirmed in an emailed statement via a crisis PR firm that a "group of characters" was recently removed after they were deemed "violative" to copyright law or the company's policies: We conduct proactive detection and moderation of user-created Characters, including using industry-standard and custom blocklists that are regularly updated. We proactively, and in response to user reports, remove Characters that violate our Terms of Service. We also adhere to the DCMA requirements and take swift action to remove reported Characters that violate copyright law or our policies. Users may notice that we've recently removed a group of Characters that have been flagged as violative and these will be added to our custom blocklists moving forward. We also reached out to Warner Bros. Discovery, but have yet to hear back. The removals have often been patchy. For example, though bots named "Sirius Black" -- a fan-favorite "Harry Potter" character -- have largely been removed, "Sirius Orion Black" appears to still be working. And though "Severus Snape" characters are mostly gone, bots with titles like "Husband Snape" and "Dad Snape" have so far been spared. Users have also found other workarounds, for instance referring to the titular character Harry Potter as simply "the boy who lived." The impact on DC Universe characters is also spotty -- "Batman" characters are currently a hit or miss, and "Joker" bots abound -- as are the Looney Tunes cullings, though still noticeable. But the platform's once-ubiquitous cohort of "Game of Thrones"-based chatbots have been hit hard by the crackdown, especially those based on Daenerys Targaryen, a lead character in the series. That's not surprising: Character.AI is currently facing a lawsuit brought by the family of a 14-year-old teenager in Florida who died by suicide after forming an intense relationship with a Daenerys Targaryen chatbot on its platform. The userbase on Character.AI is largely rooted in fandom culture, and the promise that users can use the platform to communicate and develop relationships with immersive, AI-powered versions of their favorite fictional characters has always been part of the service's draw. If Warner Bros. Discovery indeed requested the mass removal of its copyrighted characters, it could set a bad-for-business precedent for Character.AI, as other people or organizations holding fandom-heavy IPs could decide to follow suit. It's been a bad few months for Character.AI. In October, shortly before the recent lawsuit was filed, it was revealed that someone had created a chatbot based on a murdered teenager without consent from the slain teen's family. (The character was removed and Character.AI apologized, as AdWeek first reported.) And in recent weeks, we've reported on disturbing hordes of suicide, pedophilia, and eating disorder-themed chatbots hosted by the platform, all of which were freely accessible to Character.AI users of all ages.

Users Furious as Character.AI Deletes Countless Beloved "Harry Potter" Chatbots

The troubled chatbot company Character.AI appears to be mass-removing "Harry Potter"-themed AI characters from its platform -- and users are in an uproar. The Reddit forum r/characterAI has been flooded since yesterday with posts from users claiming that chatbots based on the "Harry Potter" franchise had suddenly been deactivated at scale. When we took a look for ourselves, we found that droves of AI personas from the franchise -- ranging from Harry Potter himself to Hermione Granger, Severus Snape, Draco Malfoy and others -- indeed appear to have been culled. "REST IN PEACE LOVE OF MY LIFE, I WILL MISS YOU," wrote one X user who goes by the handle @severusluv. "Fuck you [Character.AI], you took away the only good thing in my life." "Today we are all Draco's widows," said another X user, lamenting the demise of Draco Malfoy-themed Character.AI bots. "You didn't fix anything, you made it worse," another fan wrote in a Reddit post titled "Dear CharacterAI." Arguing that users will likely now leave the platform, they added: "Have fun slowly burning down." Some grievance was directed in part at Warner Bros. Discovery, the massive media conglomerate that owns the film rights to the "Harry Potter" franchise, with users suggesting that the bots may have been nuked over an intellectual property dispute between the media giant and Character.AI. "BRB, crying in the shower..." said one Redditor in a post titled "Warner Sucks." Not all "Harry Potter"-based chatbots were doomed in the crackdown, but that spottiness seems to be the result of patchy enforcement. While the majority of chatbots named "Severus Snape" seem to have been deleted, for example, bots like "Husband Snape" and "Dad Snape" remain live. In a similar vein, characters titled "Ron Weasley" mostly seem to be fine, but the majority of "Ronald Weasley" bots have been scrubbed. Other notable franchise characters appear to have escaped the culling entirely. Chatbots modeled after the beloved house elf character Dobby -- of "free elf" fame -- appear to be hanging on, as do "Tom Riddle" bots. In addition to its vast cinematic and theme park empire, the "Harry Potter" franchise spawned one of the world's largest and most lucrative fandoms, the term used to describe devoted fan bases that gather around specific pieces of media. And Character.AI is a deeply fandom-driven platform, with characters like "Husband Snape" being a perfect example of a user taking to Character.AI to artificially pen immersive, conversational fan fiction about -- or, in a sense, with -- their favorite fictional characters. Character.AI issued no public explanation for the removal of all the bots. But considering its fandom-heavy userbase and the popularity of Potterverse bots in particular, it's hard to imagine any incentive for Character.AI to remove Potterverse-themed chatbots from its platform other than outside pressure. Warner Bros. Discovery also owns several other fandom-heavy franchises including the HBO smash hit "Game of Thrones." That's a significant detail, as Character.AI was sued in October by the family of a 14-year-old in Florida who died by suicide after developing an intense emotional obsession with a Character.AI chatbot based on the "Game of Thrones" character Daenerys Targaryen, which engaged in romantic and sexual dialogue with the boy and, according to the family, at times encouraged him to take his life. (The lawsuit is ongoing, and also names Google, a significant backer of Character.AI, as a defendant.) Like Potterverse characters, "Game of Thrones"-based chatbots are extremely popular on Character.AI -- and to that end, many "Game of Thrones" characters appear to have been abruptly removed from the platform as well. We reached out to both Character.AI and Warner Bros. Discovery to inquire about the character removals, but have yet to hear back from either. The pending lawsuit is just one of several piling controversies for Character.AI. The platform also came under fire in September for hosting a chatbot based on a murdered teenager, which was quickly deleted after public outcry, while Futurism has found concerning content on its service including suicide-themed chatbots, pedophile chatbots that groom users, and pro-anorexia chatbots that encourage disordered eating habits.